Yay!

After years of saying we need one, we should get one, there has always been something else come up and no money left over for it. So when I read on one of my local facebook buy swap and sell sites someone was getting rid of one, I thought twice. Then the man said it was for free and whom was I to argue! I went to town promptly to pick it up. Not expecting too much, kids in tow, by myself I managed to get it into the back of the car. I was a bit busy when I got home so in the back of the car it stayed until a little while ago. Again by myself (I am pretty resourceful!) I got it out the back of the car and proceeded to pull it apart to clean it up. Steel brush in hand, hose at the ready and off I went scrubbing and hosing in the sun (hence the hose :-) I think I may have gotten a tad sunburnt given the time of day but it was well worth it! The pic below is of my 'bargain'. All I had to buy was a gas bottle and I am all set for a BBQ dinner with my wonderful family!

My (our) garden is coming along wonderfully with our first watermelon picked the other day. It could have baked for a little longer but still tasted good to our watermelon loving daughter! And our sunflowers bloomed just in time for christmas day. They are beautiful if I do say so myself so we have planted a few more seeds so we can grow them in quick succession (if the dog stops digging them out).

Christmas was a quiet affair in our house, it was a bit surreal that DH was actually home as he was rostered on shift but did not have to turn up for it! So we enjoyed watching the kids open their pressies, had prawns for lunch, a few beers and roast chicken for dinner.

Santa spoilt us with a chicken pen which was finally delivered yesterday, so this afternoon if DH wakes up early enough we will begin to put it together (pictures next time). Unfortunately DH is on night shift at the moment so I will just have to enjoy that glass of wine by myself whilst we (or he!!!) negotiates the construction instructions hehehe!.



I do apologise to family who like to read my updates, they are not as regular as I would like to do them, but even now whilst I have put this blog together I have had to ward off the mob who so desperately desire my attention (aka my children). So for now you will have to put up with my sporadic updates. School starts in 23 days (not that I am counting), and I should see some free time then to do regular updates.
On a brighter note, my girls puppy is growing huge and he is just as mischevious as she is. He loves our thongs which often end up in 100 pieces and is slowly learning who is the boss, whilst increasingly tolerating DD affection. Cheers for now, and Happy New Years.

In a Bucket!

We are having such a good time up here that the kids decided to get sick and ruin our run of good health since being away from the child care! The past 3 days Master5 has had his head in and out of a bucket with a tummy ache and temps with a heat rash (I think), and this morning Little Miss 3 has decided she needs a bucket also! Let's just hope she finds the bucket in time if she actually needs it, this house is fully carpeted and I have run out of my floor spotting spray. And, to add to the turmoil, my DH threw up on the way to work the other night!??! They all seem to be nauseaus, and I am praying my tummy is strong enough to avoid it (goodness knows how the household would cope then!).
Our gardens are coming along nicely, my second garden has been filled (I got in trouble for working out in the sun just before lunch, but with the kids I do what I can when I can).  I probably could have watered the garden with the sweat I produced that day! I now have some nice tomato plants growing, a beetroot, some shallotts, a few bok choy seedlings, some chilli plants, strawberries, ginger and tumerick. We had some lettuce but the dog knocked them down, and he has also dug DH's pot plants to find the pecan nuts DH had planted (I think the puppy likes the pecan nuts!). 
The kids planted sunflower seeds a little while ago, so we have now also made a flower garden, recycling the rocks out of the old gardens which were here when we moved in. And we have grass! Our dirt patches are disappearing and the grass is nice and green (for now).

 Since I brought the boat home, we have spent a few days at a local weir. Catching crayfish in pots and catfish on the line. Nothing else of note from the weir at the moment, except the kids love swimming there and we have enjoyed taking the dogs on the boat for the first time also!

Pictures at last!

I found my camera in no other place but the car where I left it, so here are the pictures I promised!

The Clan.



Boys being boys. "All my boy wants for christmas is a water gun!"

 My girls party dress! And the shirt she got from the Grands' which she put on herself.






Our girl with her puppy dog, he wont be that small for too long.

Chattter chatter chatter chatter...............

Have been meaning to write another post but am trying to find my camera so I can share some piccies with you all. I might just have to do a picture post when I find it! I find it hard to write a post at the moment cause all I hear is chattter chatter chatter chatter from the kids, then a scream and a cry and a tease and a lot of Mummy listen to mmmeeeeeeee. We recently did a trip down to our old haunt to collect our boat stored at my Mums place near the beach, a 7hour trip down in the car with the kids by myself - needless to say I am greatful I took the portable DVD player because it meant the kids had something to occupy themselves with instead of chewing off my ear for 7hours! Though, we will be in for a new DVD player soon cause I broke the cover off this one on the way home trying to open it, still useable, but not very travel friendly anymore. Mabey that is one for Santa!
Well, we got to catch up with my inlaws on the farm which was great, I have always enjoyed going out there with none of the usual social/town distractions we encounter most days (I am tossing up going for a walk to buy the newspaper today, which you can't do out there). The kids loved collecting the chook eggs and visiting the goats. Their Aunty was a wonderful help in guiding them around the farm, it is wonderful they are getting to know her and are happy to play with her most of the time. It is a different life on the farm, one which I could quiet easily slip into and after seeing my kids out there I think they could too!
We spent the majority of the week at my Mums place near the beach, close to where we used to live. It was nice being back there, but I don't miss it. We had some wonderful times with some fantastic friends, an impromptu dip in the ocean :-) and all the busyness of getting the puppy, sorting out the boat for the trip back, checking up on our property, and spending time with my Mum. I don't call it a holiday, but I did enjoy catching up with our friends.
We also had a day at my Sister in Laws for my Niece and Nephews birthday party. A massive blow up water slide was the main attraction of the party which the kids utilised extremely well (until it got a little cold), and lots of sweet treats! Even our new puppy had a ball eating the cake and anything else he could get his mouth on, only to cry half the evening due to a sore tummy from over-eating. He was all good after he threw up, three times!
Another stop in at the farm on the way home (as busy as the farm is, it is always nice and peaceful), to collect some seeds and cuttings for our garden at home, then the trip back. It was just as long as the trip down, but it was good to get home.
While away, my wonderful husband finished off the edges to my garden beds and laid some grass seed on our bare patch of earth we have dug up (ie. most of our yard!). I am tasked now to fill the beds (a layer of composting leaves from the previous gardens, a layer of horsie pooh, and a layer of topsoil and we are ready for planting). Not an easy task as my garden beds are approx. 2m long by 1m wide, so that is a lot of compost/manure/soil I have been carting. It took me 2hours the other day to mostly fill 1garden bed.
Back to reality and Christmas is looming, I keep seeing facebook updates only 6 weeks to go (or some nonsense), and I have not even started. I have thought about what we are doing, but that is as far as I have gotten! I will weave my magic soon and have a day in Rocky by myself to get organised, and that will have to do. It is afterall about the company you keep, not the material posessions we recieve, so I am just glad my little family will be together on the day, after DH gets home from work :-)
Keep smiling, pictures to come soon!

Nearly There.

How exciting, we have our first garden bed in! It has taken 6weeks of cutting down and cleaning up and we finally had the space for our first garden bed to go in. This is one of 5 we are doing. DH has been busy planting fruit trees around the yard and they are all going great, the soil is wonderfully fertile and our olive tree has grown about a foot in 4weeks.

We had the dingo in yesterday, he levelled the ground where all the holes were, dug up the garden from next to the stairs and levelled there also. What would have taken us a few more days to finish, he done in 1hour. Was much less back breaking, plus we had already done most of the hard work! Our second garden bed is getting into position, just needs levelling and straightening, and we have tomato and beetroot planted in the first bed. The kids are growing sunflowers in pots (right pic near the brown gates), and when I get back home from visiting everyone we will finish off the other garden beds. Hopefully we can sort out our chook pen not to far down the track also. DH has wrangled some bathtubs from renovators so we are in the process of sorting out a worm shed, so far we have been told the bath tubs are ready for collection so we purchased the bolts to build the shed - one step at a time!

Tomorrow I head off with the kids on our adventure to try and get our boat up here, which involves getting a new boat trailer, transferring the boat to the trailer and strapping it down ready for the 7hr trip back up here. Am hoping my old neighbour can spare me some time to help out! Oh, and we pick up Little Miss 3's new puppy dog named Rusty (the main reason for the trip!).

Am not sure how I am going to fare with a puppy on my 'holiday'! Will be an experience, that is for sure. The kids have adjusted to life wonderfully up here, though Little Miss 3 is starting to feel the heat on the hotter days, looking all flushed and  ready for a nap by 9am! I love being at home, though never realised how much a 4yo actually talks - it seems to start when his eyes open in the morning and does not stop until he goes to bed at night, and his sister is beginning to follow suit!

Enjoying It!

It has taken almost a month, but we have finally had time to casually enjoy the situation we have found ourself in! Our life presently revolves around our garden, demolishing what was there so we can put our own mark on it, and it sounds like rumours are rank and we are the talk of town. So what! It is our garden and we are putting our stamp on it and in 3months people will have forgotten what was there and appreciate alongside us what we have done. Our veggie seeds were potted yesterday and hopefully they dont need transplanting before the actual garden beds are ready!

Halfway through demolishing 'our' garden.

The kids do miss their old friends from daycare, but we have been going to a playgroup and they are slowly making new friends. As our focus has been on the garden, we have not spent too much time socialising, so when the prep orientation pack came in the mail today I was a touch excited. Given it is a small school with only 3 classes, I think making friends for my little boy will be a little easier next year!

So the highlight of our month here has been last weekend, a few birthdays celebrated and one fantastic day shared with our wonderful family. We spent our little girls 3rd birthday exploring our neighbourhood. We went to the beautiful Blackdown Tablelands and swam in some waterholes with little waterfalls which I am sure will thrive with the addition of a downpour of rain! A saussage sizzle lunch in the camping grounds shared with the local birds who actually stole the sausages out of our hands as they swooped past (a little scary). We ended up having to protect our sausages as we ate them so we did not go hungry!

Just 2 of the 'locals' eyeing off our lunch!

After the kids had a sleep on the way home, we freshened up and spent the evening at a local rodeo. It was our kids first rodeo, and they were excited, anxious, scared but in the end totally elated with their experience so much so that they did not sleep on the drive home, at 930 at night! The kids enjoyed playing with their bigger cousins, and were sad when they left. Master 4 was so that he would not go outside to say bye. Was very sad!

So everyone has left and it is back to gardening (and work for Hubby). The first day everyone had gone was a little quiet, but we got through it and are back in full swing of life here. I still have a few boxes to sort, but they are not important and I have nowhere to unpack to. There is a nice furniture store in town selling quality wooden furniture which is what we like, so I have been pricing pieces!

No matter what comes your way, make it your own and enjoy it, xo.

Busy busy busy little bees we have been lately. The move went well, the unpacking not so well (I am still going!), and the kids have settled in perfectly as if they were meant to be here.
We have checked out the shopping haunts, planning shopping trips and some kind of schedule for the groceries is coming (as is finding all the room for the stuff I need to buy!). Right now we have a local woolies to utilise 20 minutes away, but it is only a small one compared to what we are used to, there is a pool and small cinema, and other shops as necessary to keep the community running. It is not too bad and enough for us to survive without going too far. All else is a 2hour drive away, so I am planning to only 'need' to go there every 4-6weeks.
Our big job is gardening. The main garden was overgrown and nice but not what we want in the yard, so the job of demolishing a garden someone has spent years growing is underway with some scrutiny from the locals. So we have currently taken approximately 20 trailer loads to the dump. You can just imagine how much work has gone into filling those trailer loads! The kids are loving spending the time outside. If the TV is off, the are out by their own choosing (it helps that the toys are set up under the house!)
Cleaning is a breeze in such a small house! The old house took about 2hours to do all the floors, this one is done in less than half an hour - I wont be requesting to move back to a big house anytime too soon! It is also helping to declutter, as there is no room for all that clutter anymore. I have sent quiet a few boxes to the dump just full of junk, and there are a few more for vinnies. All that stuff you keep and say just in case, I wont be doing that too much anymore.
Pictures are coming, when I find the battery charger for the camera. It is somewhere downstairs in a box I have declared not important and will get to when I feel like it!

Nearly there!

Just over one week to go until the big move, it sure has come around quickly. Luckily I have this weekend and the next to get my stuff sorted. The yard is looking good, with the dogs track almost gone. I will have to try borrow Mums' gerni and clean the outside of the house soon.
After, embarrassingly, trying to pick up Little Miss 2's bed yesterday (the 98 kg package did not fit on our trailer and had to be put back in the warehouse!), we now have to wait for it to be delivered today. So a good excuse to go nowhere today!
I got to sleep in until 7 today, I am stoked cause during the week the days I worked were the days this happened and the one day I didn't work, Little Miss 2 was awake and up at 615. Not to mention the midnight cry for our someone special, hopefully the move and being reunited with her Daddy will eliminate this horrid night time routine!
With everything which has happened this week, Master 4 has been discussing dying. Not the kind of topic I ever thought I would discuss with such young children (let alone my own children), so we have had a few heartfelt conversations about not dying until you are really old, then we had to discuss what is really old and lets hope we don't have to go there again too soon.
Enjoy your weekend.

See you soon Tiger!

Last weekend when my husband went back to work, he took our much adored dog, Tiger, with him to the new house. This was a big move for him as he had never been in the car before, so I was relieved 6hours later when Hubby rang saying they made it and Tiger basically slept the whole way (lucky dog).

After a bad day Monday, to be told the dog had got out of the yard (among other not so positive news), my mind starts racing "what are we going to tell the kids", and "I don't want a puppy at the moment", and similar. Luckily, we discovered the neighbour who lives in the house everyone thought was vacant, got annoyed with Tiger crying through the night, he took him in and the dog was happy again, just wanted some company! It sounds like he has had a good week and is more comfortable in his surrounds, with 'Daddy' visiting daily to feed him.

I can just picture Tiger now when we get the kids up there, his excitable self with Master 4 giving lots of cuddles and kisses, I think seeing his dog happy will be the initial highlight of the move for our boy!

Wonderful weekend.

I love my family, no matter how frustrating things get, at the end of the day the kids are always there to give me a cuddle. This weekend my husband was home so I had to share my cuddles, but that's ok because it is nice to BE cuddled sometimes too!

I always feel so busy being a working Mum, but this weekend was different. It is great doing fun stuff with the family, so when I look back on our weekend just gone and recall how much we did, I am amazed I did not feel rushed at all!

We watched movies while the kids played outside, we went fishing, we did dog poop patrol in the back yard, we went ten pin bowling, took the kids for a play in the park, went to a chinese restaurant for dinner and at all times managed to get Little Miss 2 home for all her sleeps to keep the bad attitude at bay!

This will be our last splurging weekend for some time now, as we plan our big move up north - one the kids are suprisingly looking forward to. Hope you all had a good weekend!

Is it the weekend yet?

Wow, what a week. Started off wonderfully, who loves receiving flowers from their significant other? I sure do, and got a lovely bunch on Monday, delivered to my work, I felt special!

Fast Forward to today, a vomiting child at 530 am - definately not the way I like to start my day. Little Miss 2 has been unwell for the better part of the morning, then went to sleep at 11am for a good 2hour nap! Getting through the afternoon, I was sure she was better, eating her lunch and a snack, having plenty to drink, then we spent a few hours outside, things were looking up. Until 415 when we came inside and that bug inside her tummy decided to wake up again. All I heard was a cough (she was in the lounge room, I was in the garage doing laundry), so I ran down the hall shouting out 'is she sick again', with the positive reply I had dreaded. Luckily she had picked up the bucket which we had kept handy all day, keeping my hygenically fresh mopped floors clean (in a manner). Purging her stomach obviously makes her feel better because she immediately asks for more food! Until the next nauseaus wave pulls her back down. So, in the past hour and a half, she has consumed a small dinner roll, half an apple and about a cup of water. Needless to say, I dont think I need to worry about her dehydrating for now, but lets see what the night holds - I am sure it will not be friendly.

Fast forward to the weekend when my loving husband will come home to our beautifully sanitised house (so as not to pass our bad bugs on to him or any visitors), I can finally have some rest, and hopefully that special feeling comes back!

Hello World!

I have contemplated 'Blogging' for some time now, and this morning I decided it was time to give it a go. So here I am. I have started this blog for no other reason than to keep a journal of sorts. For me, my family, or whomever wants to read it.

I always have lots to say, about my kids, my husband, me, our life, and this blog will be an account of all that I love! Good days and bad, happy and sad, we all have them.

We have two children, Master 4 and Little Miss 2. They keep us pretty busy on a daily basis. Our current interest is drawing, and posting the letters we write (and boy are we going through envelopes right now!).

I am currently (on an irregular basis), trying to teach myself how to do crochet. Starting with some basic stitches, I have made a few test squares which the kids have claimed!

My husband loves fishing, he is successfully sharing this love with our children. They are avid fishing kids, and often outfish us! I love fishing, for the time out it gives me, the joy of being outdoors, and I don't mind the act of fishing either.

See you all soon!