MOTHERHOOD

I can hardly believe that my second Mothers Day has already been and gone.  My SECOND one!!  It's the oddest feeling.  I looked back on photos of myself as a young teenager recently with my braces and my frizzy hair (thanks for nothing puberty) and my painful insecurities, and I found myself whispering 'You're a mother and a wife now'.  I somehow wasn't really certain that motherhood would be in my future, I just couldn't picture it.  But I felt certain (naively so I now see) that if I was ever to have children, then motherhood would come naturally to me.  Of course I quickly learned that there's quite a difference between being the oldest of five siblings and changing the odd nappy, to being entirely responsible for the well being of a perfectly helpless little person.  And so while I found my pregnancy, and to some extent the birth to be a breeze, motherhood shocked the hell out of me.

From the moment my slippery, sweet little daughter was placed into my arms my heart began to pound at triple the speed.  My anxiety levels went through the roof, although exhausted I couldn't sleep and I stressed about the smallest of details.  I think looking back I was terrified.   Once I was back on my feet I fretted over the house not being clean enough, the garden looking overgrown, dinner not being up to scratch.  All this with a crying baby on my arm that never wanted to be put down.  Of course I was in a constant state of tears.
"Be kind to yourself", my mum kept saying to me gently.
That's easy for her to say, I thought.  She's nothing short of bloody superwoman!
Anyway over a year on and I think I have only just started to relax.  Only just realised that the only thing that matters at this time in my life is that I'm the best mother I can be, and sometimes that means saying to hell with the housework, the cooking, the washing... today I'm going to chase seagulls down at the beach with my little girl, we'll have an omelette for dinner and maybe our clean socks just won't be a matching pair tomorrow.  I feel like for the first time in a year I am taking a breath,  I'm stopping to enjoy and simply observe this amazing person we created.  And do you know what?  The house isn't actually messier than it was before and nobody's complaining that dinners a little overcooked.

Life is funny the way it's always testing and pushing us, but in the end the rewards usually far outweigh the struggles.
xx

First date

It's crazy to think that Nic and I have not actually spent any time alone since Ayana was born 15 months ago!  Up until last Wednesday that is when Saba offered to come and babysit so that we could go on a 'lunch date'.  We left the two of them sitting at the dining room table together enjoying a late lunch themselves while I quickly swapped my food incrusted toddler jeans for some 'going out in public' clothes and jumped in the car.  We giggled nervously, gave each other shy side ward glances, tried not to check our phones every five minutes to see if Ayana was alright and we talked!  We talked like real people, sometimes even about unbaby related things.  It felt so good, so refreshing, so very adult like! I sipped a margarita (hey why not!), I didn't have sticky little fingers making a dive for my food all the time, nobody was tugging at my shirt trying to get a sneaky milk feed and my clothes were practically still clean by the end of the meal.  Of course by the time we got home (an hour later) I was already missing my little one like crazy, but it also made me realise that I've missed my husband and partner in crime over this past year! 
We are of the co-sleeping/ baby wearing/ breast feeding persuasion, and while I have no regrets about that I can see now how it's time to find some balance between baby and husband.  She's old enough now that I can leave her with my mum or my sister for a couple of hours and know she'll be in good hands.  I'm realising that it's ME with the attachment issues rather than her.  Heck she's having so much fun that she barely notices I've left.
If there's one thing I've learned about this whole parenting game though is that you have to be flexible and open to constant changes. So here goes mama, a new phase is upon us and I need to learn to let go and embrace it!  In the mean time I am counting down the days until our next date.
xx

For the love of Feijoa's

There are few things I really like about Autumn and Winter.  I hate the cold, I'm not a fan of root vegetables and I can never find a good jacket but I do love feijoa's!  At this time of year there is nothing more delicious than sitting beside a luscious feijoa tree, heavy with these tart green fruit on a sunny Autumn morning.  One after the next you collect them from the ground, split them in half with your fingers, slurp out their content and throw the peels over your shoulder.  Yes at some point you'll get up groaning as you clutch your belly and curse the huge pile of skins that have amounted up behind you, but in the moment it's all well worth it!
So while we still have an abundance of feijoa's, Saba has been giving them a little French twist...

 Feijoa Tarte Fine

Tarte fine is a simple, delicious French tart, made from puff pastry, thinly sliced fruit, butter and sugar. That's it!  We like to use store bought pastry, to keep it ultra simple!  Sadly today we only had non-butter based puff pastry in the freezer, but I highly recommend making this with a butter puffy pastry, it's 100% more delicious (in New Zealand, Paneton make a great ready to use butter puff pastry, you can find it in Nosh, Farro Fresh and selected New World supermarkets).

What you'll need:
Ingredients:
1 sheet of puff pastry
30g unsalted butter, melted
6 large feijoas, peeled and sliced
Sugar for sprinkling

What you do:
Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius,
Cut four 10cm discs from your pastry (I used the base from one of my mini tart tins to trace around)
Place pastry discs on a buttered baking tray, and brush with melted butter.
Arrange feijoas on the pastry, overlapping slightly, leaving a small border around the edges.
Brush the tops with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar (how much really depends on how ripe your fruit is, and how sweet you like things!)
Bake for 20-30mins until the pastry is golden and crisp.
Let cool for 5-10mins, sprinkle the edges with icing sugar, and serve!   Of course no dessert is complete in this family without adding a little whipped cream, but this tart is just as delicious without it.
 Recipe from Cuisine
Serves 4
Don't have feijoas?  Tarte fine is traditionally made with apples, but so many other fruits work really well too such as plums, apricots, peaches, pineapple... The options are endless.


Feijoa cake

What you'll need:
2 large eggs
100g sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

100g butter
150g milk
170g all purpose flour (this cake works well with spelt flour too!)

5g corn flour

3 tsp baking powder

Enough feijoas to cover the top of the cake.

What you do:

Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease a 28cm baking tin.
Peel and slice your feijoas (not too thinly).
Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla until pale, thick and creamy (this is the most important step, so make sure you don't under beat this).

in a saucepan, heat the butter and milk until it just comes to the boil.

Sift the flour, corn flour and baking powder together, and fold into the egg mixture.

Lastly add the hot milk in 2 batches, mixing until just combined.

The mixture will be creamy and quite runny, and may even have a few small lumps, that's ok!

Pour it into your greased baking tin, arrange the feijoa slices on the top (you want to squeeze in as many as possible!)

And bake for around 20-25mins. Try not to over bake this one, or it will be a tad dry.

Notes: I made this cake yesterday as a simple lemon cake, to do so, just add the zest of 3 large lemons to your sugar, and omit the feijoas. I then slathered it in a not too sweet lemon cream cheese icing, yum!
xx
P.S

Ayana is obsessed with feijoa's!  There are some days when I feel like I can't get the girl to eat much else, but at the moment if it distracts her from her teething misery then I'm happy :).

Easter

If you live over this side of the world and you're not religious, then Easter is a bit of a bewildering holiday.  Rather than celebrating new life and colour, we're collecting fallen leaves in red, orange and brown.  We're just packing away our summer clothes and pulling our musty sweaters out of our wardrobes.  And it's still incredibly exciting, there's still that buzz in the air, and I'm still secretly counting down the days every year!
Every Easter all the 'kids' stumble into my mums house one after the other, usually nursing a hangover.  The coffee machine flies into action, the decorated eggs (for which the chickens are locked into their coop the previous week so that we don't have to hunt for their latest nest under the house first) are put on the table, and this year the smell of Saba's homemade hot cross buns fill the kitchen.  As everybody wakes up, the noise in the house goes up several notches and before long the friendly teasing, bickering, joking sets the tone for the day.  Let me tell you, this is when I am at my absolute happiest!  To be surrounded by all my siblings, their partners, and now Ayana too is my idea of a perfect day.  After breakfast we hunt for chocolate eggs (Ayana had a couple of little presents to find instead), steal eggs and swap eggs... and then crash out on whatever spare couch there is and sleep off the sugar comedowns.
Can't wait until next year.
xx

Autumn storm

When we woke up bright and early on Thursday morning it seemed as though nature had turned horizontal.   The thick line of bamboo that normally shelters our garden was on a dramatic lean, the rain whipped past the kitchen window, and the birds began chirping with irritation long before dawn broke.  We had quite literally just finished nursing our first cups of coffee for the day when the house suddenly went quiet.  The whirring, buzzing, beeping, humming... it all came to an abrupt halt.  There was an uncomfortable silence and then 'Ohhh it's the bloody power again'.  The THIRD power cut in a week!  Let me tell you, you quickly realise how much you rely on it when it's suddenly gone.  To be cooped up in our dark little house with no water (because we're on tank water so it requires the pump to be working), no light, no internet, no music and a raging storm outside just feels nothing short of archaic!  I know, I hear you muttering "First world problems", under your breath. And you're right of course.
When the storm finally cleared in the mid afternoon, I packed Ayana into the ergo and we checked out the damage on the farm.  The air was thick, humid and completely still, the light had an eery iridescent glow to it and the wildlife seemed to just sit there in a state of bewilderment.  Two hours later and we were still sitting down in the paddock beside the apple tree eating until our bellies ached.  Neither of us wanted to go back and sit in the house... ever again!
x