The homemade baby-10 months in.

Well, time has flown and my baby is now 10 months old-he's even taking a few steps. And he is still a homemade baby! I've been meaning to put in regular updates of this project, but life and all..........We haven't bought anything new for him, and he's cost us less than $200 all up. The original plan was to try for three months, then six, and it's just been so easy we've carried on.

I admit, it's pretty easy for your fifth child-we have lots of hand me downs. But then again, our sole present this time was a couple of 000 bodysuits which the monster outgrew by two weeks old-by the time you pop out number five it seems it's old hat and nothing special. Most people should be able to sustain themselves on presents alone for their first!

So, what have we done?

-We've bought him no new items (clothing, toys, furniture etc). I've made him a couple of things, but only with fabric I already had in the cupboard (which is admittedly not too limiting......). I've bought a couple of clothing items from op-shops, and been gifted with a few bags of hand-me-downs.

-He's completely cloth, he hasn't worn a disposable. Very happy with that, as that's the one everyone says you can't do. Ha! All of them have been hand-me-downs or made by me-again, not too limiting as I had three in cloth at one stage and he gets all my experiments. He has a terribly complicated stash.

-He's breastfed, yes I finally achieved it! He has used two tins of organic formula. One for sanity saving for me, and we're using the second for mixing with food-no fridge means no EBM storage and i'm not too keen on the idea of milking myself daily at the kitchen bench.

-It cost $95 to get his tongue tie snipped. Eek, but worth it.

And that's it.  Proof that babies are only expensive if you read and follow the baby books, and therefore 'need' gazillions of gizmos.

Homeschool Snapshot

Making volcanoes and blowing up balloons with bicarb and vinegar.

The new neighbour.

Yellow spotted monitor (i'm pretty sure, anyway). A rather young one, based on how much bigger the adults we've seen around are. It's taken to living under the concrete and chasing the chooks.

In the fourth month........

Well, we have been living the feral life for nearly five months now. There has been masses of hard physical work (so much so that I am now 57kgs and can fit into my pre-kids clothes), lots of frustration and more than a couple of hissy fits. But..........I think we've come out the other side. We are living a very simple lifestyle by modern standards, but are deriving immense satisfaction from it.

Define the feral life?
-300W of solar power, total. You know those standard grid-connect systems to supplement suburban houses? Well, they're 1000kW. Yep, we're on less than a third of that.
-Hot water via donkey. Not the hee-haw type, a drum that you light a fire in that thermosyphons water. You want a shower, you go collect sticks.
-No fridge. The solar is too tiny. Funnily enough, after the first month or so I realised how little stuff actually needs to be in a fridge. When you don't eat meat, have chooks and get an increasing amount of fruit and veg from the garden then it's nearly obsolete. Because it's heating up i'm looking at the little car ones just for our milk, butter and cheese, then we can take it camping too.
-Seven people living in a one bedroom house. Not as bad as it sounds actually-there's plenty of outside space so there's been little claustrophobia.

We've been ready to pack up a few times. But it passes. I can't imagine having to go home anywhere else-it literally feels as if the stress of the world falls off my shoulders and i've come back to my cosy little haven every time I crest the driveway. I think we may just stick it out :)

Science

I read an article in Warm Earth tonight, written by Joel Salatin. Others with an interest in sustainable agriculture will know the name. He runs Polyface Farm in the US, a sustainable, humane polyculture that is one of the growing number of places that is showing people that chemical agriculture is not actually all that great.
Anyway, it's about sound science, and our worship of science and scientifically gained results, and our acceptance of those result over good old common sense. I love this part-

What are the new darlings of sound science? Irradiation, genetic
engineering, more concentration, less domestic production, and a Wal-Mart on
every corner stocked to the hilt with amalgamated, extruded, reconstituted,
chlorinated, adulterated, manipulated, constipated psuedo-food.

Describes the stuff at the supermarket perfectly.

And don't even get me started on media misrepresentation of sound scientific research, gah.

I speak for the trees!

Our block has about 300 avocado trees on it. This was rather peripheral to our decision to purchase, but we did decide to look into it to see if it would be worth putting the effort in to get the rather neglected trees back up and producing. After many phone calls and much research, it isn't. Avocado's time as a high return crop is over, there's no way to do them organically and ours are infested with phytopthera and anthracnose. Luckily I haven't seen any signs of fruit spotting bug or fruit fly as we're going to have enough problems with disease spores in the soil and dams as it is.

So, D took his axe and we all played at the Lorax today-he was obviously the Once-ler and the kids were all being the Lorax, yelling 'I speak for the trees!' and pretending to knit Thneeds. We're hacking down the section of them that's closest to the house, as that's where we'd like to put the beginnings of the food forest and the permanent chook run. The quicker we get them out the quicker we can start to rehabilitate the poor soil and plant some pioneer legumes and a green manure. The kids all picked the ones they could find (they're hidden in there above) to feed to the chooks-none of us eat the things.

Now, normally i'm a tree fan, but chopping these down is immensely satisfying. They've been nothing but stress as we've chased down the DPI and other places for info trying to make the best decision. Plus, a lot of them are like this rather pathetic specimen-as the roots rot the branches die back to match the root area. D has been able to push over or uproot a couple of them.

I've never been so glad that something failed!

And done.

Moving is done. It was hell. I don't think I have it in me to move ever again. We're planning on counting up all the different places we've lived in our eight years together-should be scary.

But I don't think I will ever want to move again. It is paradise here. Apart from a few hissy fits (still continuing) about life being just so damn hard with no fridge/oven/hot water on tap/automatic washing machine it is perfect. All the problems are fixable, and if this is as hard as it gets we're laughing. I love driving down our road, it's like we enter another world far, far away from the modern one-and far, far better.

The chook collection is already burgeoning-we had six Australorp pullets ordered, but before they got here bought some New Hampshires, a rooster called Rodney and his four girls, plus had a frizzled Australorp thrown in. Then the pullets arrived so now they are 12. I can see this becoming an addiction. The mulch pit is taking shape, D is going to grow muscles on his muscles (i'm needed to um, supervise. Oh, who am I kidding, i'm weak!) We need to do something better than the current greywater system of running it onto the grass, ugh. (We have moved it away from the house though).

No pics, rural phone lines mean dialup only and that meanders along at about 22kb/s on a good day-bring on satellite!

But i'm loving the peace. I'm loving waking up in the morning to see trees, looking out the window from the couch and spotting a wallaby and just having time. This is it, after so long spent running around like madfolk we're here. I've even noticed my brain slow down it's frantic pace-maybe now i'll be able to hold a decent conversation without skipping around on topics, I swear people must think i'm on speed sometimes. It's good to finally feel calm again, it ended up being an impossible state of mind in suburbia.

So worth the stress and worry-at 25 I have my big dreams all done and the rest of my life to enjoy them all. Such an awesome feeling.