News in Brief – The April ’16 Edition

If you tried to log in for your dose of She Sows Seeds goodness last week, my apologies! Having some minor (read: brain crunchingly frustrating) technical issues meant that the whole site was down, along with my photography website also. Not ideal…but all is well in the strange old interwebs again! And if nothing else it did give me a little forced blogging hiatus, just as well because we have been busy little bees…

Grandi’s big move is this week!!! As expected that crept up entirely too quickly for my liking, but I haven’t had time to really dwell on it. We’ve been doing load after load to the op shop, selling furniture, sorting out who is taking what between us four kids…a big job but the end is in sight! As a result though we’ve inherited some family furniture to somehow jam into our cosy little farmhouse. First off, the piano which my sisters and I learnt to play on, and which originally stood in the Elsternwick home of my great-grandparents a century ago.

I am very rusty, but will have to brush up and re-learn how to read some sheet music to keep Eleanor entertained (I’m envisaging some sort of Elton John ‘Crocodile Rock’ singalong?) At Grandi’s Eleanor was quite fond of giving the ivories a fair bashing, but here in her playroom she has largely ignored it? Every now and then I’ll hear a deep tone echo through the house, as she can only really reach the lower end around the bench seat. Hopefully she will learn to play one day too and we’ll having the sound of her great-great grandparents piano in a home of ours again.

With mum on the move our big square family dining table was in need of a home (mum’s moving into a two bedroom apartment) and Matt has always loved it. I was neither here nor there about it, mainly because I so loved our existing dining table which was also from my great-grandparents home. But in reality, I longed for a larger table to entertain more, potentially use as extra bench space in our kitchen, and we did have the floor space for it. So in it came. It seems entirely grown up and like a real family table, which is lovely. Mum still has four of the chairs (we couldn’t leave her to sit on milk crates!), so we’re currently running a motley crew of our existing white ones from the op shop and the ones that go with the table…dining chairs are such a difficult beast. I don’t like the very 1990’s ones that come with the table, but not sure what to do otherwise? Match the timber? Go completely different and white like we’ve always had? Hmmm…

We also inherited the sideboard that matches the table, which meant at 11pm last night we were moving furniture and emptying the entire contents of our pantry and a few kitchen cupboards to make it all work! We got there in the end though, with our pantry now closer to the kitchen and not almost in the lounge room which used to drive me batty. It’s all a work in progress, as eventually we’d like to get a new fridge and make our fridge space a pantry. An evolving beast. Patience, grasshopper.

With the onset of April the weather has well and truly turned about – it’s very Autumnal today, sunshine then rain then wind then sunshine. The leaves have begun to turn, chestnuts are littering our lawn and thoughts are turning to weekends full of firewood chopping. Dark clouds roll in during the late afternoon, daylights savings has ended and darkness descends earlier and earlier. Our familiar hills are full of potatoes being harvested and (hopefully) pregnant ewes fattening. Summer has well and truly left us.

It’s my very favourite time of the year, the onset of Autumn, but I do say that when we emerge into Spring also…mostly I think I’m very grateful that we live in a part of the world where we truly experience four definitive seasons. But at the moment in my nesting, growing-a-human phase, an Autumn of preparation for a Winter hibernation ahead seems entirely appropriate.

What’s going on in your neck of the woods?
Lit the fire yet or holding out like us?
Got a tiny house full of inherited furniture?
Growing a Winter baby?