Day 4 - Baking

Well quite obviously these posts are not running in daily format and I have to confess that I have had so much 'joy' taken from my life recently that I have very little happiness going on right now. I decided though I will think of something today that really gives me happiness to get rid of my humdrum feeling.

So today what gives me immense joy is baking. I have always loved baking and when our children were younger I baked every day. There were always cake or biscuits, scones or pudding to eat.... always a variety and never a short supply.

My specialities in those days were scones, milktart and chocolate cake. As something to do with the boys when they were at pre-primary we had an afternoon of baking every week. It was a time we could spend together having fun and they not only learned fine motor skills with l mixing and patting and rolling, but they  also learned math with measuring and taking instruction from the recipe.

I will never forget the day that we made scones and Matthew pounded his dough like he was making a mud pie. I told him to calm down, he had to treat it gently otherwise his scones would not rise. Our scones went into the oven and the boys waited patiently (another skill to learn) while they baked. Well when those scones came out of the oven who looked the fool for producing the flattest scones? Yes, it was me... and whose scones rose the highest? Yes, they were Matthew's.

Baking these days is not to feed my family treats but to earn much needed income. Every creation I bake and decorate gives me huge pleasure and satisfaction and I thank the Lord for blessing me with a gift, a talent, that I can use to help our family.

Day 3 - Matthew

Day 3 comes on the tail of day 2, posted earlier today but I am trying to catch up now...hehe

Matthew, for those who don't know us, is our eldest...our first born....our blue eyed boy and only because his eyes ARE blue and Mark and NiQi's are brown.

Matthew makes me happy...
He is one of those children who can make you want to tear your hair out one minute and the very next your heart melts with love.

We have a special mother/son bond that has stood the test of time.

He was always the child I worried about. Unlike Mark who was brave enough to stand up for himself and NiQi who went with the'flow', Matthew was very easily influenced as a youngster. Years of being under my thumb, youth and Sunday School, taught him as he got older, to stand for truth, honesty and loyalty.

He had a tough time growing up with cousins that bullied him and pushed him around and an infinite love for his brother who he fiercely protected. He matured early and was wise beyond his years. With Johan away so often for badminton, birds or work, he became my sounding board for advise. He listened and he helped me in so many ways.... looking back I realize that he had far more placed on his shoulders than any child should have had to deal with.

When he was 11 he saw and lived the turmoil our family went through after the death of his ouma and just 7 weeks later the death of his brother. He endured what no child should have had to. Yet through all of these challenges he managed to excell both in the classroom and on the sports field, earning an academic scholarship to St Charles College and playing for their 1st rugby team post matric.

In his final year of school a life changing event happened that affected the rest of his year and ultimately the rest of his life. His faith pulled him through as he carried this secret with him for the next 12 years, dealing with it in his own way. This secret was revealed in the most malicious of ways by someone whom he had loved and trusted with his life. Revealing it was the beginning of the end of the relationship. The trust was gone and with it everything else he held dear.

The last year has been the worst and the best in his life. A chapter closed that he never dreamed would close and a new one began, a better one.... one that has given him more peace and happiness than he ever imagined would come his way.

He is our boy, our son, full of integrity, striving for truth, putting the past behind him and looking ahead to a brighter, happier more fulfilling future. He is my happiness today....

Day 2 - Fruit & Veges

Well what would you know,  I am now a little behind with my 365 posts after power outages again. No worries though, we will stay positive and do a 'catch up'.

So Day 2 I am happy about our little vege patch and our fruit trees in the garden. I have plans for our veges in the future, but as a start we planted a few plants of a few different crops to see how they will fare.

We have had varying weather patterns from plenty of rain in spring to very little in summer. The spinach developed rust and we decided to start over by planting more, then it righted itself and started looking good. The spinach is great for salads, in quiches and for the birds.

We had a few peas and next time I will plant a lot more bushes because they don't produce huge crops. We used the very young ones in salads and the older peas in stews.

The chives have been brilliant for the fillings of my savoury muffins.... and if they are not inside they are on top for decoration with cream cheese.

The tomato plants haven't been as successful, except the baby ones which again we used in salads.

The couple of green chillie bushes have done well, producing more and more with time.... wonderful for soups and curries.

The brinjal plants battled with the drought but managed to produce 5 fruit. If they survive the winter I have no doubt they will do even better next year and I am glad to see they are flowering again at the moment which is a good sign.

The lettuces grew well and were wonderful for our salads. I would go to the garden and just pick a few leaves at a time so the plants could continue growing. We have left them to bolt and seed now and I hope from the seeds we will have many more plants growing.

The green peppers also produced a few fruit.... we will definitely plant more next season.

We have cabbages, cauliflour and brocolli growing now and I am excited to see four well developed heads of cauliflour, four smaller heads of brocolli and four tight heads of cabbage.

The spring onions have also done well and been used in both salads and soups.

We planted beetroot but it hasn't done that well... maybe because we planted them in the wrong area. We live and learn from our mistakes.

I am not sure the potatoes have survived as I see the plants have now wilted.... we will have to see what transpires there.

Then we have butternut, self grown from pips thrown on our compost. There are still a few growing and we have already picked and enjoyed some.

In summer we had guavas, chinese guavas and figs.... although the birds enjoyed the figs before we did. We are wiser now and next year will be more pro active about reaping the crop.

Now we have the pecan nuts, avocado pears and all the citrus trees. The grapefruit are the ruby reds and delicious for breakfast. The oranges are a mix, one tree has ready to eat sweet and juicy oranges and the others are smaller, less sweet and better for marmalade.. the lemons are knobbly but still useful for both baking and marmalade. The naartjies are still ripening which is good because when the oranges are finished they should be ready to eat.

So Day 2 I am happy and grateful for the wonderful fruits and veges we have enjoyed and will still enjoy.... next year I pray for bigger crops and more variety as we expand our garden.

Day 1 - 365 days of happiness

We have had so many soul destroying things passing through our lives in this last year that have caused pain and heartache, that I have decided to look for the good in every day from now on. Much like the '100 happy days' I did in Facebook a couple of years ago, I am going to do '365 days on blogger'.

Day 1 - Pecan Nuts

We have two beautiful big pecan nut trees in our garden. The one tree was growing before we moved away and one year we were sent up a bag of nuts that were reaped from it. They were more than likely from it's very first crop, and we really did enjoy them. We didn't get any more after that year which was most disappointing, and when we asked we heard that the monkeys were enjoying them on our behalf.

So this year I have kept an eye on the tree, and there were many days that we heard the monkeys up at the top near the trees. When exercising the dogs in the afternoons, the evidence lay on the ground of opened shells and half eaten nuts but we kept looking and picking up nuts as they ripened and fell to the ground. Every morning when Johan or Wilfred feed the horses and every afternoon when I go out, we gather nuts like squirrels storing for winter.

The second tree, although younger, seems to have borne it's very first crop this year with just a few laying around for us to find. Hopefully next year it it bear more.

As we look up into the almost empty branches we see just a few still hanging on, but we are really blessed by what we have gathered so far. I haven't weighed them but I think we may have about 10kg of nuts. Enough nuts to see me through the year of baking carrot cake, pecan nut pie and Christmas Fruit cakes later in the year. Yummmmmmy....

20%

Yesterday Johan drove NiQi up to Jo'burg for a clinic visit at Charlotte Maxeke and then on to Milpark for admission.

We have been planning this trip with great care for some time, as NiQi has not been well for many months now. When she arrived home after her last admission near the end of March, she said she felt like it was all a waste of time. My thought is that her resistance to antibiotics seems to be taking it's toll on her system and de-sensitizing her body before treatment each time only helps in so far as allowing her body to accept the combination of antibiotics given to her.

This last three months we have held on to the bitter end although I kept saying to her that if she wanted or needed to go earlier we would take her in a flash. In the middle of it all she caught a cold and had complete bedrest for more than a week. Thank goodness she had no fevers otherwise we would have definitely called her doctor and driven her up.

The beginning of May she organized 3 days away with her cousin and their respective fiancées which she loved to bits. It was definitely good for her to get away but the journey was taxing on her body and it took her another week to recover.

The oxygen machine has been running day and night and we have fitted it with the long tube so she can walk from her room to the lounge and the bathroom.

Most days she has lay in bed watching series or movies on her laptop, inbetween posting on Facebook for our baking and catching up on our admin.

The days that her fiancée had time off work she insisted on spending the time with him but at the end of it she would collapse into bed and try to sleep till late the next day, which she did unless woken by a call.

It has been very taxing on her health though and I have watched her appetite decrease as she kept insisting she couldn't eat any more otherwise she would vomit. I had to nag her to do her night feeds, though so often she couldn't do them as we have battled with power failures in our area.

Ever the superhero, she has never let on to those around us how much she is battling. I watched as she stood in the supermarket chatting to a neighbour as if everything is fine but then walk ever so slowly to the car afterwards because she used so much of her energy talking. She would sit at the market with me and chat to customers, always happy, always with a smile on her face, but as soon as they have moved on, she collapsed back on the chair sucking on her asthma pump and breathing controlled breaths to gain her strength back. She is a wonderful actress, she deserves an oscar every day for her performances.

So yesterday when she had her lung function test, it was no surprize to me that it was down. What was a shock though, was that it was down so much..... far more than I imagined.... far more than I expected. Sitting at 20%, a drop of 10% from her previous test, she is now not far off the 17% she was in 2012. We have a lot of work ahead of us if she wants to stay on the transplant list but we've done it before and we can do it again.