that moment, when you realise you are living your dream....

Ever since I was a teenager, in the mid 90s, obsessed with Earth Garden magazine, I would dream of 'one day' having a place in the bush, building a house, having milking goats and chooks and living self sufficiently growing all my own food etc etc.  I used to draw designs of my hand built mudbrick house and all the animals I would have  (at least one of EVERY farm animal that there is!).

We hatched ducklings form our own ducks this season, so cute!

Funnily enough, as I was rushing back in from locking up the goats in the dark, to get back to read the kids their bed time stories it clicked for perhaps the first time, that this is as close to living one's dream as it gets.  We have been eating meals made pretty much entirely from our own produce for weeks now.  I'm preserving lots of weird and wonderful pickles, cooking tomatoe sauce, making sweet chilli sauce, and contemplating the storage options for what looks to be a bumper pumpkin harvest.  I've made more cheese than I care to think of, and seem to have to bake more bread than I sometimes feel like (the romantic notion of cooking on the wood stove isn't so romantic on a hot day, and far too sweaty!!).

Abundance is heavy work when you need to push it up hill....

So many cucumbers!

I won't be sorry to see the end of the tomatoes!

Perhaps I didn't realise I was living my dream, because while it might all sound idyllic and all that, its SO MUCH WORK.  I love it don't get me wrong, but I just don't get alot of time to contemplate or think about these things, I am usually thinking about the next thing that I can get done.  And then there is the sleep deprivation (our one year old has very quickly turned into the WORST sleeper in our family by far, yawn...), the late nights preserving and baking and washing up (not so idyllic).

So while its not all perfect and there are so many jobs we want to get done, I also feel that I am as close to my 'dream' as I 'need' to be.  We have achieved so much, and its so truly satisfying to eat meals made from all our own produce and to sell some too.  A few more weeks and it will be mostly over, everything will be 'in' and either stored in its natural state or will have been cooked, dried or something else, and then perhaps there will be that elusive relaxing day by the fire in winter reading or spinning wool or something, ha!