I am so very, very lonely.

Bean has been gone for three nights now, tonight is the fourth.

Every night Moe has sobbed himself to sleep, in my arms of course, calling out his Daddy’s name. The shortest length of time so far has been one hour and ten minutes. My cuddles don’t cut it when he knows his much loved Dad isn’t here.

Sprout understands it a bit better, but I’m not sure if that makes it easier or harder for her? She has shed lots of tears over Bean’s absence too.

We’re more in limbo than ever right now as we wait for someone to take over the lease to this big McMansion. We can’t leave Albany until that’s sorted. I’m hoping that next week brings news that someone wants to live here, and move in soon! One group have come through already and they would like it, but not until June. Oh dear, I do not want to hang about in an unfurnished house in a basically friendless town for another 6 weeks!

Today the next door neighbours had a party. There were heaps of cars parked out the front of our house, and several of them belonged to people we have met before. Sprout got very excited, thinking people were visiting us since they were parked on our front lawn. Her face fell when she realised they weren’t.

She heard the party next door and looked at me with big, wet eyes then said,

“There’s kids playing together next door. I wish I was playing with those kids.”

Oh my broken heart. I wish she was playing with them too.

The last time she played with other children, at Play in the Park, was the same day she said goodbye to Bean. Since Wednesday night it’s been just us. We’ll not socialise with anyone again until Tuesday when we go to a Play in the Park again, provided it’s not raining.

This week our days have been long and lonely.

Picnics in the loungeroom don’t hold the same appeal after a few days of it.

The park down the road is just another setting for the lonely and understimulated sprogs to argue with each other.

There have been so many arguments I’ve lost track of them. Arguments over who will ride the bee wheely bug and who will ride the ladybug wheely bug. Arguments over who will sit on which side of the toy chest we’re using as a dining table. Arguments over which apple belongs to which sprog. Arguments over the pink teddy and the brown teddy. Arguments over who goes on the slide, and who goes on the swing on the left… It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, they just want to argue.

They’re angry, bored and confused… so they argue.

I’m trying to be everything to them, and it’s not very realistic. I just hope it doesn’t last forever.

Thankfully my exceptional, wonderful and generous sister has decided to bring her family for a visit next week, so we’ll have some external input which will be so gratefully received. We just have to make it through the next few days together, and we’ll have some much wanted company…

Van Halen, the 1970 kombi, is one of the things we desperately needed to sort out this weekend, before Bean flies out to Geraldton (not intending to return to Albany and our current house) this Wednesday.

Since we moved to this place 8 weeks ago Van Halen had been parked in the garage, with all windows but the windscreen out and the sliding and front doors off, getting a bit of attention from Bean most evenings once the sprogs were in bed. Bean was prepping Van Halen for a respray and most of the prep work was done by the time he was offered the job in Geraldton, not quite all of it, but most.

The major things that hadn’t been done included:

1. The driver side door still needed a fair bit more work, some welding and bog.
2. The bumpers hadn’t been touched at all and needed to be attacked with an angle grinder and some rust kill primer.
3. The headliner was still in, and stained from what we think was probably one of the previous owners smoking in it…

When we decided Bean would accept the contract in Geraldton and that we’d pack up house here in Albany so the rest of us could join him there we knew we’d have to cut some corners to get Van Halen back on the road and looking good enough that he wouldn’t attract the unwanted attention of the fuzz. Of course, we knew that when we’re not rushing to get paint on and windows in we’d go back and uncut the corners, but if we were going to get Van Halen from the state he was in to a road worthy state in less than a week we’d have to rush some things and just not do others. Ironically even before the respray Van Halen was more roadworthy than a lot of smarter looking old cars on the road because of the rust cutting and new panel work that had been done, but with a patchy paint job he would attract the attention of the cops more than he will all one colour.

We had a late night chat in the bus one night last week and decided to pull the headliner out, Liam got on to it right away and it instantly looked less crappy. We’ll probably get a new headliner one of these days, but the interior roof is in great condition and headliners weren’t stock on original kombis anyway so it can stay that way for now.

He’s resprayed the whole thing, not the original shade of white because for some reason the auto store couldn’t access the paint codes database (or whatever) this weekend and he worked against the clock to get it resprayed and put back together.

The original guess colour from one paint joint was really white, it was so crisp it looked like copy paper and we thought it sucked. The spray gun had a lot of overspray and looked pretty shocking even for straight off the gun. When he ran out of paint and we went to a different store to get more we opted for a more cream white and got a new spray gun too. Much better!

Bean has just spent 3 full days in the garage, early morning until very late at night. I’m pretty impressed with his efforts, it was a big ask to get it all done in a few days and he actually pulled it off.

At this stage we’ve decided we won’t sell it, we’ll hold on to it and probably drive it across the Nularbor when it comes time to move interstate, then get Brigit (my ’71 microbus) transported over when we’re settled. She’s going to get the full back to bare metal then 2pac treatment so she’ll be a very long term project and frankly I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t have a kombi for a daily driver (maybe be a whole lot warmer in Winter?!) so makes sense to keep Van Halen for now.

When we get some time to catch our breath Van Halen will need another coat of the same white, the doors are looking less cream and more copy paper than the rest of the body… The front will need some extra sanding and a respray, there was a rough patch that didn’t show up until the white went on. There are a couple of spots of paint that have reacted with something underneath so they’ll have to go back to bare metal and be repainted. We’ll be replacing some non-genuine seals with genuine seals, since the non-genuines are too fat and stop the doors from sitting flush wtih the body. The windscreen will also come out for the next coat/s of paint, it stayed in this time since we didn’t have the time or funds to get a new seal to put the windscreen back before Bean leaves. The tyres will come off the wheels which we’ll prep and paint the same white as the body, then we’ll finish them off with some nice chrome hub caps. The bumpers will need to be stripped back and properly prepped, they have just been painted as they were (rusty!)- no prep work at all. Ran out of time…

The interior, which is my job, has to wait too since we have clearly run out of time and don’t have all the parts we need to install the rock and roll seat and make up new door cards. Some of the interior from Brigit has gone in to complete it since Brigit just has to go to Perth where she’ll be garaged for a few months until freight time, no worries with the cops there (once we get her the 450km back to Perth that is!).

All up, Van Halen’s looking much more tidy than he did and I feel confident we’ll be able to drive it without hassle from the fuzz, the list of extra work required isn’t dauntingly huge either and won’t take long to bring him to a standard we could happily call finished.

He’s not show quality, he never will be and was never intended to be, the engine bay didn’t get a lick of paint, it probably won’t this next time around either. Still, he looks smart and I reckon he’ll turn some heads.

Bean says he’s learned heaps from this leg of the restoration, and I’m pretty amazed at how hard he’s worked and how well he’s done.

Some things we’ve learned over the past week:

1. Don’t rush in to a paint job before your prep is completely finished*
2. Don’t paint two different shades of white over each other because the underneath shade will inevitably show through somewhere*
3. Don’t paint in a poorly lit garage at night time*
4. Having a second same-era kombi makes getting parts to complete the job much easier (as long as you ignore the fact that your other kombi is looking less complete every step of the way)*
5. When painting, it’s so much better to pull the windscreen out, even if it means sacrificing a perfectly good seal to the stanley knife gods*

* All of the above lessons could also be much more concisely stated as:
Don’t take a job 900km away when you’ve got a half finished kombi project in your garage!

So now, I have a question for you, dear readers. What colour would you choose for the interior if you had a white kombi with a black VW badge? Black and white? Red? Blue? Orange? Green? Yellow? Purple? Pink? Brown? Other?

Over the last few weeks as we’ve slowly made our plan to move to Tasmania known we’ve had a lot of confused people ask us,

“But why Tasmania?”

So, here’s an attempt at explanation, although matters of the heart are rarely easy to explain are they?

You see, there’s the cost… We think we’ve missed the boat here in WA, we made some silly decisions when our relationship, and all the responsibility that came with it, was still new and very inexperienced. Those decisions left us with some debt and obviously no savings, so we lost a good few years of being able to play the property market game because of that, we’re still not in the game now but when we’re done in Geraldton we’ll be closer to being eligible to play. In Tasmania we’ll be better able to realise our dream of becoming custodians of a good patch of earth, and we won’t be getting ourselves back in to severe financial stress to get it.

While we’re talking about earth, I have it on good authority the soil is much better over there! Can’t be too hard to have better soil than where we’ve always lived on sandy coastal plains… nutrients just running straight through the sand, oh dear.

Then, probably more importantly than the home ownership dream, there’s community there and they’re happy to welcome us and hold our hands while we find our feet.

There’s other homeschooling families who have started up a natural learning collective – here’s the links to Kestrel and Lauren‘s blogs as proof.

There’s farmer’s markets galore. There’s homeschooling specific activities. There’s the perks of a capital city (large museum, state library) within a very short distance to farmland. The urban sprawl hasn’t quite hit Hobart yet.

Then, what some may see as a drawback, there’s the weather. Oh dear me! The cold. The most common thing I’m told when I mention our move is that it’s cold in Tasmania. My favourite responses are,

“Which is a HUGE draw card for me!” and,

“You know millions of people all over the world live in places where it snows and lakes freeze over in Winter and they somehow manage to survive…”

Not everyone suits hot weather, you know? I’m one of those people who, despite growing up in Perth, just doesn’t like the heat. I can do cold. I can’t, however, do hot and being a nice person at the same time!

You know, all of the explanations aside, it just feels right.

It’s an option we’ve come back to many times over the years. We were very seriously exploring the option when Moe was a baby, two years ago. Work availability kept us from making the move then. Now, with Bean’s apprenticeship finally over and his piece of paper in his hand, coupled with the years of experience during his break from the apprenticeship, work availability is no longer a concern. Work will be easy to come by, in fact it’s kinda been knocked back already because we’re not ready yet. We’ll not be ready until we can land there with no debt and a little nest egg, and thanks to this new job that can be sooner than we’d anticipated. Oh joy!

Yep. That’s probably the cheesiest blog post title I’ve ever come up with.

Anyway, I believe the cheese is warranted because I have big news to share from around these parts.

Bean got a different job. He flies out to GERALDTON(!) in just one week. The sprogs and I will stay here for a few weeks to sell or donate all of our furniture and housewares excepting what we can squeeze in to the two kombis*, then we’ll follow him up.

So much to do! We have to break the lease here in Albany, so if anyone local knows of folk looking for a house** nice and close to town and the hospital please get in touch…

The Geraldton job goes for 16-20 weeks and we’ll stay in temporary accomodation while we’re there. Once it’s done we’ll be debt free and have reasonable savings in the bank, some of which we’ll be using to relocate to Tasmania.

Yeah, thought I may as well drop both big changes in to the same post now that family have all been told the plan.

So, Tasmania here we come (via Geraldton).

Bring it on.

*clothes, camping gear, my sewing machine, fabric stash, Bean’s tools, some crafty supplies for the sprogs, toys…

**or anyone wanting furniture or white goods

I haven’t blogged very much lately. My computer was in the repair shop for a couple of weeks but I had use of Bean’s old lap top so I could have posted if I wanted to. Truth is, I haven’t really felt like I’ve had very much nice to write, so I haven’t bothered to write anything. Everything I’m feeling is so priviliged and whingey, which is pretty much what this whole post is about…

Right now I feel that our life is in limbo. We are suspended in time, just waiting for the life we intended to live to begin.

Here we are, stuck in a town we never meant to live in. Even though we chose to move here as a stepping stone to moving to a town nearby (but too far to be a part of right  now) it certainly wasn’t part of the plan to stay here for a year. You see, we were just passing through.

Now, it’s been a year. We still don’t have a friendship group. We have a couple of friends, but we really need more than a couple of friends because friends get busy with their own lives and can’t possibly be expected to meet all our socialising desires no matter how nice they are. I sort of know my way around here now, and I know lots of places that are really lovely, but at the same time our visits to those places are tainted with an impatience on my part. I’m not suppose to still be here you know?

The thing is, the longer I stay here the less sure I am that I know where I’m meant to be. A year ago I was sure it was in that nearby but not near enough town, and now I’m quite unsure that’s the place. I’m left wondering if I’ll ever find my place in this world.

Our house, it’s not a home. It’s just a place we’re staying right now, while we wait for real life to begin.

I try so hard to view it as a home… it’s just that (aside from the location) the double garage, laminate benches, cheap vinyl floor, cheap carpet, aluminium window frames, the boxy legolandness of it and lack of hanging hooks on the walls make it hard to view it as my home.

Meanwhile, pinterest is like my virtual glory box. Bookmarked pictures of wooden floors (some painted white, some clear coated or oiled), porcelain sinks, weatherboard homes, stained glass windows, wooden window frames, claw foot baths, ornate doors and lovely little DIY projects wait for the day that we have a home of our own again.

It’s not just the look of this place, or the location though. Renting is getting me down. The temporary nature of it just goes against my strong desire to put down roots, to anchor ourselves to a home, a patch of earth, a community. We have a rent inspection next week too, and while I understand a desire to make sure the tenants aren’t destroying the ever so important investment property I just can’t help but bristle at the invasion of my privacy. I keep a very clean and ordered house and I feel irritated that someone else (who may or may not keep a clean home) has a right to come in to my house and judge whether we’re clean enough, good enough, to live here. I’m confident there’ll be no problem, the house and yard are in better condition than when we got here, but it’s still awful. The worst of it is that the day of the inspection is Bean’s birthday and we’d much rather be enjoying a lunch time roast than making ourselves scarce lest the sproggets strew their toys around the house as they do when they’re home.

I have seen lots of inspirational pinterest quotes lately that say things to the effect of home is where family is, or the best thing about home is the people we share it with, and while it gives me a warm glow in my heart to read things like that I find it harder to really believe it when I see the damage that here is doing to my family.

The sprogs don’t have friends to play with regularly, they’re very isolated which is terrible for them since they’re so social, much more so than I. Seeing them so lonely breaks my heart more than my own feeling of loneliness ever could. Not only are they lonely, they’re bored too and they are harder to get along with when they’re bored. They try to stir each other up and generally cause mischief.

We’re still drowning a bit in financial obligations too. The simple maths is that the repayments and other general outgoings exceed the income, and that leads to a lot of stressing for me and Bean.

We still haven’t been able to afford a new mattress (even an old one), so we’ve been sleeping on a foam egg cup mattress topper for 7 weeks now. Oh how my body just hurts. I’m feeling tired and sore, every night that goes by without a proper mattress is compounding those feelings to a point where I’ve felt that I’m spiralling down into a dark headspace, unable to see positives where they definitely exist, unable to find joy in the days spent with the sprogs. I’ve been snappy and cranky, generally a pretty horrid person to live with really.

Thankfully my dear Mum has offered to buy us a mattress, she thinks she’s just giving it to us, but we’re just adding it to the list of things we owe her for. We hope to pay her back very soon actually, because we’ve got some great plans to get us out of debt and to the end of limbo-land fairly quickly. It’ll require some hard work and sacrifices but we hope it will pay off, hey we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t would we?!

Stay tuned, when it’s official I’ll write about it…

Wow! What a month it’s been.

As briefly mentioned in a previous post, we have moved in to our new place. I like to call it Legolandia. Let me describe the neighbourhood for you…

Double garage. Double garage. Double garage. Double garage…

It’s a bit soul destroying really.

Thankfully, while the view out the front is as I’ve just described, the view out the back glass doors is this.

Which redeems the place somewhat.

We have moved and unpacked (pretty much) everything. The house is huge, and we haven’t got much furniture* so the house echoes. The already noisey sprog noise is amplified, so I’m keen to get some quilted wall hangings on the walls to deaden the sound a bit – which is an achievable goal** now that I have a dedicated sewing/art room (squee!).

My sewing room isn’t properly set up yet, unfortunately it’s not been able to be a priority yet since I had some assignments to do and the more practical areas of the house to set up. Now all of that is done, and so I can get on to sorting out my fabric stash and setting up my machine. For all these excuses, since the rest of the house was unpacked and my assignments handed in I have lacked the motivation to set my room up, some days I could probaby find snippets of time to do little bits here and there which would all add up to a functional and productive space in no time, but I haven’t really felt very driven to take those opportunities.

Being in this house has been a bit of a challenge for me, particularly as it hits me that we’re staying in Albany for another year (well, 11 months now, but who’s counting huh?). It’s not beautiful. Not to me. It feels like I’m visiting someone else, it doesn’t feel like my home. I’m fully aware this is such a wanky, middle class thing to whinge about… but indulge me, please?

The yard is bare. Builder’s sand, dead lawn and some very sick looking lavender bushes. That’s certainly saying something… when do you ever see sick looking lavender bushes? Lavender is so hardy!

I’m working on it though… My pot plants all together on the back patio make that part of the yard look beautiful, and at the weekend I transplanted a heap of gotu kola into the bare space between the path and retaining wall down the side of the house. At the top of the same retaining wall I planted some native violet. I chose them because they both survive well in low light situations and that area only gets direct sunlight for around 1-2 hours per day. Soon they’ll both begin spreading to fill that space and add beauty to the view from the sprogget’s playroom. Planting the gotu kola there means I can harvest it more frequently than I have been able to harvest it from a pot since there’ll simply be more of it to harvest, and it won’t be able to spread too far since the growing space is contained by retaining wall and pavers. Out the front on a steep hill where there has been some pretty bad erosion caused by foot traffic killing the grass I also planted some rosemary (a prostrate variety that spreads to 2m and a bushy variety), with some pennyroyal (spreading) and yarrow (spreading). I want to stabilise that hill before Winter brings heavy rains that will wash all that sand down to our front door.

Indoors it is not beautiful either. The fittings are cheap and the workmanship is poor. I suppose it’s really to be expected when you build a huge house for very little money but it still irritates me that the carpenters didn’t hang the doors straight, the plasterers left gaps in the cornices and the electricians put the light switches in illogical places because it would use less wiring and therefore be cheaper. The floor is cheap vinyl, printed to look like wood. It’s torn and heavily marked in some areas, making it look even more tacky than it would have the day it was laid! Places like this seem so soul less to me. Still, as with the yard we are working on it…

We are doing what we can to make this soul less space a little more ours. To fill it with a bit of our soul.  There are some picture hooks on some of the walls, and so we print some of Bean’s photos to hang. There is a large jarrah dresser in the living area that came with the house, it has become home to my dipensary. Tinctures, dried herbs, essential oils, carrier oils, clays, ointments, creams, pure plant incense… I think it is beautiful, and it is convenient too since we use items from my dispensary every day.

I am trying to love this place as our “for now” home, and trying to think of it as more than simply a stage to wait out until a better life comes along. Some days that’s easy, and some days it’s terribly hard.

Today has been a nice day, we had rain overnight which cleared to bring us a sunny, warm day that was perfect for playing at the park which we did twice. There was more laughing than crying today, more co-operation than argument, and lots of love. The love is always there though, even on the days we all cry and argue…

We’re doing our best, I’m doing my best, to enjoy right now and to be very grateful for what we do have,  and right now that is a home that is much larger and more comfortable than the shed. Being rid of the shed is something I am particularly grateful for!

*Our mattress got mouldy at the shed so Sprout is the only person in our family who actually has a bed and mattress at the moment, the rest of us sleep on the floor!

**Provided the owner agrees to let us put some hooks up.

Hi folks! We have moved, we’re fairly settled, and we’re connected to the nerd again. I have a post about all that waiting in my draft folder to be finished and published but for now I would like to quickly update on a decision I have made regarding this blog and my children.

Going over the archives you may notice some gaps in some posts where pictures should be. Don’t bother refreshing your browser because it’s not you, it’s me. I have deleted all pictures of the children and will no longer be uploading any more pictures with the children in them. Pictures of our children will now remain private, for our family and friends only, and will not be uploaded to any internet site.

Bean and I have discussed this at length and agree that we don’t feel comfortable sharing photos of our children on a platform as public as the internet where we can’t know who is viewing them and for what purpose. We have decided that it is not our right to put photos of the children on the internet when they are too young to give informed consent.

There’ll still be pictures of Bean and I, other adults whose permission I have to share their photos on the blog, food, gardens, fabric, sewing, art, doll repaints, beautiful places local to us etc. Just none of the children, not our children or anyone else’s.

Now that I have a sewing room I hope to bring you plenty of fancy quilt updates, and now that we have a blank canvas for a back yard I hope to bring you plenty of gardening updates too. I’ll stil be sharing stories involving the children, just no images of them to accompany the stories.

Squee! We’re moving from the shed into a house this weekend! We just found out today…

This will be the eleventh time Bean and I have moved since we got together just over 5 years ago. We’re kinda moving ninjas after all those moves.

This time we’re moving alone, with the exception of a friend helping to get the fridge and washing machine onto the trailer at the shed end due to the awkward and uneven nature of the terrain here. The friend in question is quite a bit bigger and stronger than I am, so we’ve requested his assistance for the two largest, most awkward items.

I’m so excited to be moving. The house isn’t in Denmark, where I wanted to move to when we first left Perth for the south coast 10 months ago, but it’s another stepping stone and I feel comfortable with the decision to sign a 12 month lease here in Albany. TWELVE MONTH LEASE IN ALBANY! Eeep. Did I really say I was comfortable with that?

Well, yes. Yes I did.

The house we’re moving to is not at all our style. It’s a lego-land house with a big double garage right out the front. It’s new and has four bedrooms and two bathrooms. We would never buy a house like it, not in a million years, but it is simply perfect for us to rent right now.

It’s 1.3km from the hospital construction site that Bean is working at, and will be working at for the next year at the very least so he can ride his bike to work and come home for lunch every day. It’s new and therefore requires no maintenance from us, meaning we can spend our spare time pursuing our passions rather than maintaining someone else’s house. The garden is simply empty beds and parched lawn so we know that they’ll be in better condition when we leave than they are now, no matter what. It has a double garage which means the kombis will finally be parked under cover when we’re home after 10 months of being parked out in the rain which has made them so much rustier than they were when we moved here. The garage and the close proximity to Liam’s work also mean that we can take them off the road one at a time and do some serious restoration work on them which we have been hanging out to do for so, so long now. The four bedrooms mean that Sprout can have her own bedroom, which she has been saying she would like ever since the novelty of first moving in to the shed wore off, about a month into it! It means we’ll have room for family and friends to stay if they want to visit us, which we haven’t been able to offer since moving into the shed. The best bit though (for me)… It also means I can have a studio. My own space to sew, to study, to do art journaling. Oh I am so, so excited about that bit.

We did consider moving to Denmark. We put a lot of thought into it because I really, really wanted it. We decided though that for now, with Bean about to begin doing a couple of hours overtime every day and with the debt that we have to service, the commute from and back to Denmark five days a week is just too much. That’s an extra 10 hours a week that Bean would be away from us while traveling to and from work and it’s 500km per week worth of petrol and wear on Van Halen as well. We have chosen our need to spend more time together as a family and to spend more money on debt repayments over our strong desire to move to Denmark.

We know we’ll get there one day and this move, this job that Bean is doing, it’s all just a stepping stone. We’ve got some loose ends to tie up and this is part of that. For now, we feel confident this is going to be a very good move.

I’ll see you on the other side of it all…