Three Weeks.

The clock is unremittingly ticking and the days are vanishing at great speed. The deadline of having the house and our family all packed up and organised before we board the plane is looming. It's scarily close now.....we have just passed the three week mark. I have been waking in the early hours of the morning and tossing and turning and panicking......about everything. In theory, it all seems like such a wonderful thing to do, to relocate your family from Hobart to the South of France for a term, yet trust me, in practice it's daunting. I would usually be the first to deny this now blatantly apparent fact and I'm ashamed to admit that I really am a creature of habit and staring down the barrel of change and challenge is difficult.

I remember all of these emotions from 2010 when we went to France for 8 months.  At three weeks out, I had an incredibly graphic dream one night, about giving birth. It was technicolour in it's clarity.....I was on the operating table and they were actually performing the caesarian. It was so real. The next day was Anzac day and while we were walking into town for the march a text message from a friend came through announcing the  birth of her baby daughter. A wave of memory engulfed me about my dream and prompted me to tell my husband all about how I'd given birth to our fourth child.....in a dream. We laughed our heads off. I think we were almost crying with hysteria about the ludicrousness of it.  Nevertheless, there remained an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty that I just couldn't shake off...it had been that kind of a dream. We, of course, decided that there was absolutely no way that it could be an omen....yet, just to make sure we stopped off at the chemist on the walk up the hill on the way home.

So, I peed on the stick....all the while berating myself for doing so....as if. Lo and behold it was positive. I was 38 and accidentally pregnant. I was having a baby and it would be born while we were in France. Dreams of wine and blue cheese* were dashed. Every minute detail of this impending trip had been worked over and over......for three long years. I can't describe the feelings of terror, confusion ad uncertainty that engulfed me. There was lots of crying. I felt sick....yet maybe that was just morning sickness. There was no way that my basic school girl French was up to it. We had already rented our house, so we couldn't stay at home even if we'd wanted to. Emails were sent to the American Hospital of Paris and replies received.....a caesarian and five day hospital stay....would amount to approximately AUD$20,000. Eek. What were we going to do?

We got on the plane. We thought that we'd suck it and see. Mercifully, once we arrived in Espondeilhan, one of the families who lived around our courtyard had a six week old baby which was how we got the recommendation of an obstetrician. Our landlady, who had spent days instructing us in the idiosyncrasies of the local areas shop opening and more importantly, closing times, rang the obstetricians rooms, explained our situation and convincingly haggled to get me an appointment. She wouldn't take no for an answer and they acquiesced. So, then I had a doctor and a quote for a caesarian and stay at the local private clinic....for AUD$5,000. Phew. The relief. The experience was similar enough to going and seeing my Hobart obstetrician, except that he had no long, detailed, repetitive boat conversations with my husband.....as he just didn't understand enough French. My own French was stretched to the limits as my doctor spoke no English. No English. This, as you can imagine, was just a tad tricky, especially as at our first appointment he jabbered something in my direction and left the room. 'I think he just asked me to take my pants off' I told my husband in confusion. 'You want to be sure that's what he said!' he replied. He had. Now though, I have a fully operational vocabulary of French gynaecological and breast feeding terms....words they just don't teach you in French classes at school or at Adult Ed. I also have a a beautiful two year old daughter who was born in France and was such a special, special souvenir:

So, once again, three weeks out from our departure, we are wrestling with a cacophony of emotions. My 91 year old father in law was rushed to hospital last week. He is still there. Yet again, we have been questioning whether or not we'll actually get on the plane.

Rx

*The French, surprisingly enough have a very draconian policy of zero tolerance to alcohol consumption during pregnancy yet their attitudes towards eating cheese are much more enlightened. Having endured three pregnancies in Australia where the fear of eating blue cheese or any soft cheese is promoted, in France eating blue cheese is OK....I checked with the pathologist not once, but three times to be sure......just so long as it doesn't contribute towards you putting on any more than the prescribed 12 kgs weight gain. My French doctor weighed me at every single appointment......I had never been near the scales when seeing my doctor in Hobart.....and commented, at one stage, to my husband's utter delight, he told me that I had to reduce! Truly.

Curious.

I've had a curious day. On the one hand I was feeling very virtuous as I completed my BAS (yucky quarterly tax reporting) and did three loads of washing. This high induced by hard labour was somewhat tempered by spending part of the day dwelling on the fact that the boy's school is next to a rather large electricity substation. This is a big issue for me - our family uses herbal toothpaste and shampoo from the health food shop and I would never dream of feeding my children a biscuit from a packet because of the dangers of trans fats. At after school pickup time I had this conversation with another mum and she showed me a YouTube clip of a group popping corn with their mobile phones. How in control of our lives are we really when we live in this modern world? It's an insurmountable question.

I finished The Paris Wife.  It was compellingly un-put-downable even though I knew it was going to end in tears. And it did - spectacularly - when Ernest left his first wife Hadley for her best friend. Sordid and sad. He then went on to repeat the same adulterous process three more times.

Half way into the book, I was surprised by the idea that Ernest and Hadley Hemingway thought that going to a bull fight while pregnant might have a positive influence on their unborn child. I went to a bullfight in Beziers when I was pregnant and was worried that it may have the opposite effect. Especially as I started uncontrollably sobbing as soon as the first poor, confused bull was shunted into the arena. Kim and I discussed it at length at the time and I considered keeping my eyes closed.

A week before, we had been reading aloud Roald Dahl's Boy while trying to drive around Cornwall in a motorhome. Here's Tobes at the wheel:

Apparently Roald's father took his pregnant wife on a tour of famed beauty spots so that she could gaze and gaze at beauty in the leadup to her confinement. While gestating I may have seen a bullfight yet I also saw Paris in the springtime, the snow capped Pyrenees and the azure blue Amalfi coast. That should have overcompensated...shouldn't it?
R

Flour.

Remember when we had a family day trip to Oatlands just before Christmas? Well, we went there ostensibly to procure this chemical free, Tasmanian grown, ground in the historic Callington Mill flour:

My children adore Italian food and it has to be the one country where they will eat whatever is on their plate - and let's face it it is usually pizza or pasta - with none of the requisite complaining. I must admit to being rather partial Italian food to the extent that when we were there last, and I was pregnant, I used it as the perfect excuse to taste my way around Italy. Let's face it I was going to end up looking like the size of a house anyway. Rome, Naples, Siena - pizza, pasta and at least one if not two gelati a day. My favourite was anything from Grom whereas Kim tried a pear and pecorino from a gelateria in Cortona and was instantly enamoured. He keeps threatening to experiment and make a Roqueort and caremelised apple ice cream?

So, all was good until my next appointment with my French obstetrician who put me on the scales (as he did every single visit) and told me in no uncertain terms that at two thirds of the way through my pregnancy I couldn't put on any more weight. And that I'd have to 'reduce'. There was no mistranslation. In France during pregnancy 10 - 14 kgs is the accepted weight gain over the entire 40 weeks. As far as I know there is no limit to weight gain during pregnancy in Tasmania - I had NEVER been weighed before and as an extreme case in point a friend of mine put on 30 kilos during pregnancy and wasn't chastised by her doctor (can you believe that).

Anyway, I deviate, back to the subject at hand - carbs. Tonight I made the children a pizza. I always use this book for the recipe for dough:

It is insanely easy. or 1 pizza, measure 225g plain flour, then I tip in some dried yeast and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Start mixing and then gradually add 150ml hot water out of the tap. You want a nice, soft dough - add more flour if it's too wet, more water if too dry. Easy. Especially as I use my KitchenAid so you don't even need to get your hands dirty:

Leave it to rise for an hour then knock out the air, fit onto a pizza pan and bake in a very hot oven for around 12 minutes. Trust me  - you need never buy a pizza base again:

Apologies, it was half demolished before I remembered to take the photo.
Then, because I was worried that this post was going to be dull and short I decided to really impress and make pasta. Recipes usually state 1 egg to 1 cup flour yet I find that too dry so I start off with less and add flour until it's the right consistency. We scored the food grinding attachment for my KitchenAid for Christmas so I can inally use the pasta disks I have had sitting in the cupboard forever:

However, it all clagged together and got stuck inside in the rather elaborate inner workings. This one works much better:

Right now I am about to cook the pasta so will hold off publishing this until I can show you a photo.

Ta da, pasta with crab, garlic, chilli, pasta and lemon juice:

Worth the effort?

R