Winter is sweet in Antarctica

Click here to read about snow hunting

We're two thirds of the way through winter now, and by all accounts it was a pretty harsh winter in spots, but now it's turned quite warm. This evening it's hardly cold outside. We had a few weeks where it just rained non stop, the yard turned into a swamp, but it's dried out pretty well now.

Our side garden beds are nearly ready to have things planted in them, so over the next couple of days I plan on getting some seeds planted in seedling starter pots. We've planted a cherry tree, a plum tree, and a nectarine tree out the back and a sundowner apple out the front, and this coming week we're adding a pink lady apple to our orchard. 

We're also in the process of choosing some paint to painting inside the house. We have a whole selection of greens to choose from, and our aim is to select one that matches the greenery outside the window so that we're really extending the out door space to inside. 

The chooks had a few weeks off laying but are now laying up a storm! We gave 6 eggs away yesterday and still had enough for Spikee to eat four last night (yes you read that right, 2 were bantam eggs) and eggs benedict this morning.  

So in summary, all is well in Antarctica!

 The elected spokeswoman demanding food

 The fence A built

Where the outdoor veggie garden will be

Reasonable Expectations

So many women think that they'll just go to hospital, have a baby, and all will be well. They think they will be respected, supported, and that the experience will be a happy one. Unfortunately that's not what's happening to many women. I'm one of the ones who didn't have that experience.

When I go to the supermarket I don't expect the staff to treat me specially, I just expect them to be polite and helpful. When I imagined what my first birth would be like I had similar expectations but they went unmet. However,  unlike a trip to the shops, the ramifications of my "birth" were lasting. They still impact on me thirteen years later.

Sometimes when women are critical of hospital staff or their birthing experiences, they are met with disbelief, criticism, and outright anger. I don't really understand why it's so hard for people to believe that a woman and her baby were treated badly in a hospital. 

People criticise hospitals all the time, there are frequently news stories which report dangerous, dissatisfactory patient care, but society won't accept that this reality extends to the maternity ward. We know that doctors often make errors and do shonky work, but for some completely unfathomable reason it's almost impossible for some people to imagine an obstetric surgeon in the same light. 

It's nice to think that birthing women will only be surrounded by caring staff who work hard to ensure the safest, happiest birthing experience possible, but it's not reality. The same way that it's nice to expect your grocery shopping trip will be easy and you will encounter only friendly and helpful staff, but you know you may also encounter rude, bored, inexperienced, rushed, and overtired staff - you should expect nothing less in a hospital when you intend to give birth there. 

So if you are pregnant or planning a baby, what can you do to protect yourself against the possibility that you will encounter less than perfect hospital staff?

1. Give birth at home with an independent midwife and / or a doula. 
2. Take a doula to hospital with you
3. Be well informed about hospital protocol and typical interventions and their impact on birth
4. Write a HARD ARSE BIRTH PLAN! Don't stuff about with "wish lists" and never ever ever include the words "unless necessary". If it's necessary of course you'll consent to interventions - refer to point 3.
5. Ensure that your partner is well versed on your birth plan and hospital policies. He / she may become your best advocate or be used against you. (it happened to me twice) 
6. When you're in labour it's not your job to please hospital staff or to be convenient, it's THEIR job to ensure that your needs are met, so be assertive!
7. Last but not least ==> if a woman says she was treated badly and feels dissatisfied or worse, don't deny her that personal truth. Be part of the solution, don't add to the problem.

Remember that although you  may want a natural birth very few staff in a hospital have ever actually seen birth without interventions, or unhindered birth (click here). Watching The Business of Being Born is an eye opener when the young medical students are asked how many unhindered births they've seen and they all answer "ummmmm none". Statically speaking, if you're after an unhindered birth you have a far greater chance of getting it at home.  

Finally, to those doctors, midwives and nurses who do work hard to protect women's bodily integrity, and offer genuine support to labouring women, THANK YOU! Please keep doing your job to the best of your ability, and when you hear women criticising hospital birth, don't take it personally. Work towards changing the system that you work in but don't attempt to silence a woman who has suffered birth rape, birth trauma, or dissatisfaction as a result of her own experience. 

What's white and fluffy?

SNOW!!! 

The hill with snow icing on top, taken from our front doorstep by Stylish

Mount Wellington, taken from the Tasman bridge while we drove over it.

The day before Spikee's birthday we went to get last minute party supplies and when we drove through Longley there was snow beside the road so we pulled over and threw it at each other. Stylish had decided to stay home that day so she missed out, but she noticed snow on the hill so she took pics of it for us. Spikee thought snow was excellent! 

Today we're more or less stuck in the town because the rain has caused the Huon River to burst its' banks and the roads are flooded, and who wants to drive on the icy roads anyway! Luckily we're well supplied. The weather has been crazy, much more extreme that locals can remember it being for about 20 years. We had several black outs the other night, one on Spikee's birthday night when we were without power (thank heavens for the wood heater!) for a couple of hours. We played snakes and ladders by candle light. It was actually nice being all snug and warm and just being a family with no technology however we didn't complain when it all came back on. 

The Quiet Breastfeeding Nazi

I don't consider myself to be a breastfeeding nazi. I'm just pro breastfeeding and anti formula. I'm not anti women who formula feed though, just anti formula company. I don't have a single nice thing to say about companies who produce artificial baby milk. They seem to do nothing but undermine natural baby feeding, break WHO advertising codes, and make mega bucks. 

As I was feeding my baby the other night I was reading something about how special breast feeding is, and I thought to myself "but I don't think it IS special". Sure I was sad when my older two weaned (one at 6 months, one at 4.5years) but I didn't feel really special when I was feeding them. 

Not that it isn't special, but any time we spend with our babies is special. Any sweet little smile they give us, any time they sleep in our arms, the way they love us so unconditionally, it's all lovely. Breast feeding is just normal, like giving your baby a sandwich but easier.

I'm not lucky that I breast feed, my baby isn't lucky, we're just normal. It didn't come easily to me with any of the kids, I had to work really hard to get it right. I had a lot of pain in the early days with all of them. And with the first, it shot my confidence to bits and was the first of the steps that led to failure. And I don't think I I failed, coz I really wanted to breastfeed. I think that society failed me and my daughter by telling us that "breast is best, formula is good enough". The underlying message in that is that we can't always have what's best, but what's good enough is, well, it's good enough!

Breast is best, yes .... but it's just normal. Formula is not best, and it's only normal in cultures where breasts are sexualised and images of bottle feeding are plastered everywhere, from feeding rooms to children's books, soap operas, ads for formula but not breastfeeding etc. The symbol for baby is often a bottle! If that doesn't normalise it I don't know what does.

There will always be women who are unable to breast feed, but these women should feel no guilt. I don't feel guilt for not successfully feeding my first child, and it wasn't a physical hinderance, it was a societal lack of support that broke the back of our feeding relationship.  I don't feel guilty about it and I would never want another woman to feel guilty either. 

I'm a bit tired of the whole "don't say this or that because it might make women feel guilty" stuff that permeates every discussion about breast vs artificial milk. If you genuinely can't breast feed why feel guilty? Do you feel guilty for not being able to run fast!? 

If you can breast feed but choose not to, and you feel guilt, then maybe you should take a closer look at why you would "choose" not to breast feed. Do better next time, but don't waste time with guilt once you have thought it all through. 

I resent being called a nazi. I've never killed anyone, but artificial baby milk companies are responsible for deaths every day! I simply state the truth. That given support, the vast and overwhelming majority of women in the world can and do breastfeed perfectly well.

So next time you see me posting on facebook, or on my blog, about how women can breastfeed don't label me a nazi, because that's just offensive. Have a look at your beliefs about baby feeding, about your own body and ability to do what you are biologically designed for. 

Have a look at the way your culture has made breast feeding seem like some virtually unattainable goal.  I'm not better because I breast feed, I'm just normal. You're not worse because you formula feed, but chances are that your view of baby feeding is somewhat different to reality if you think it's simply a "choice".

Winter is Upon Us in Antarctica!

So Winter has arrived, and for all I was expecting it to be horrendous, I'm actually really enjoying it! Yes, it's cold, but we have heating here! We didn't have heating in Sydney because it was too expensive to run, so we really only used it when we absolutely had to. We used heating for two nights last Winter, one of those was when I was in labour with Angus. The wood fire heater here makes us toasty warm! Everywhere in the house is comfortable (except the rumpus room which isn't insulated)

Our firewood finally arrived! After four months of ringing them and telling them that they owed us three tonnes of firewood (we won it in a raffle for the QLD floods, way back in January). After four months of the most tireless excuse making I've ever encountered (protesters were inhibiting their ability to get it here, their machinery had broken down, they lost our phone number - countless times - they had our address wrong, they couldn't remember how much wood it was meant to be ... you get the drift?) So I rang them for the last time and, as usual, was polite but assertive, and the next day a huge truck appeared on the street with full logs! The wood was meant to be all cut up, ready to use, but what were we going to do, send them away? So they dumped it in the drive way and across the foot path and at long last we had a good top us to our supply! They were meant to being 3 tonnes, but in actual fact what they left was closer to 5 or 6. We had to buy a chain saw. A spent 3 whole days sawing, and then chopping with an axe, and Stylish and I took it in turns to help him hauling it up the driveway, across the yard to the wood pile. Back breaking work! 

I plucked a good harvest of rose hips and made apple and rose hip jelly. It's delicious on sour dough toast, and I have about a litre of it so it won't run out any time soon. We've been doing lots of good cooking, my favourite thing we've discovered is a chicken baked risotto with marinated capsicum, and butter beans. 

Yesterday was Stylish's birthday, she is now officially a teenager! We gave her a new bike and took her out for dinner to the Chinese restaurant in Huonville. We had a lovely day all round! And ate lots of disgustingly rich chocolate, mousse, and raspberry cake.

Farewell Ra

When Ra was a young cat our neighbour came and knocked on the door to tell me that she'd just seen him run over. I sat in the middle of the road with him cradled in my arms as he took his last breath and bled all over me. A had a sprained ankle at the time and he stood on one leg in the small back yard of our block of flats in Stanmore, Sydney, and dug a deep hole. We wrapped Ra up in a lovely shawl and buried him. We all cried lots.

After the burial we were standing in the kitchen, me, Stylish and A (no one else was around then) and we were all crying when all of a sudden ... Ra walked along the window sill and jumped into the kitchen.

We checked the hole ... no disturbance.

We discovered that we had actually buried the wrong cat! Ra was a pretty ordinary nondescript tabby cat! We laughed lots about that over the years, and a friend who is a teacher told her drama class about it and they did a play of the story.

However, we didn't laugh last week when we really did bury our little middle aged cat.  He started getting thinner, and a bit moth eaten, he went off his food, and within days he pretty much wasted away to nothing. We took him to the vet who basically said that he was too far gone to warrant testing. She said to take him home and keep him comfortable. The two conditions she suspected were both untreatable anyway.

We brought him home and he had a quiet  last week with us until one morning he just died in our dining room. A and Stylish were with him. He's buried next to the hothouse where he spent many hours in his cat style day spa.

Cooling down

The weather has been cooling down rather fast, and this morning we had our first serious frost. The fire is keeping us lovely and toasty warm of an evening and my new slippers are a very welcome addition to my slothful wardrobe.

Some of our recently planted seeds are sprouting up in their planter pots, keeping warm in the hothouse. The tomatoes are still giving us plenty of juicy harvest and when the weather gets too seriously cold for them to keep ripening we're going to make green tomato pickles with them. Spikee is very keen to help pick the green tomatoes. He'll be less keen to eat them if history can offer us any clues.

Vinnie and Ra seem to be embroiled in an ongoing war for top cat. Ra is winning by virtue of his sharper claws and nasty disposition. Angus has been driving Ra mad pulling his fur out and trying to get into his bowl when he's eating, but sometimes Vinnie and Ra have quite long standoffs near the cat bowl where Ra decided he's finished eating but won't let Vinnie finish off the scraps. it's almost as if Ra likes flirting with the dog. The dog is very keen to befriend him, and often rolls around in a submissive way trying to get Ra to acquiesce, and sometimes Ra will actually chase the dog around playfully.