A Houseful!

Yesterday evening was just amazing.
6 children and me for dinner and so wonderful.
Other peoples children are just so handy. They are always well-behaved, never talk back and they do what you say all the time.
Everyone helped with setting tables, pouring drinks, blowing on food for littler ones, clearing the tables.
It really makes you appreciate just how important siblings are. Everytime we discuss having another baby, the pure horror of my pregnancy with Charlotte and the subsequent horrific birth just flashes in to my head. But after seeing how much being a sibling in a larger family improves a childs character so much, it makes me want to reconsider for the greater good.
Hannah and Charlotte just had each other in stitches all the way through dinner - they sat at the little drawing table on the Ikea chairs together - Charlotte was putting cups on her head and spearing her pasta with the wrong end of her fork. Hannah was chattering away at a 100 words a minute. They both had a shower together and I kept peeking in on them and catching Hannah wiping Charlotte's hair out of her eyes so gently. Charlotte was soaping up Hannah's back. They were sharing toothpaste and laughing, laughing, laughing.

Ella and Bethany were in their PJs in about 2 seconds flat and then hid underneath the quilt in Ella's room with torches chattering and giggling. Sophie just wandered about happily.......

Oooh, and I just had to include the photo of Ella during her girly rite of passage! Going to sleep with a head full of wet plaits and waking up with poodle hair :)
She was so precious walking around with her head so still so the 'curls won't fall out'.
Gold.

And - tah dah - I finished a sequin leaf last night, eleven more to go....

Mum and Dad you will get to see Ella's concert video live as her concert is the Saturday before you come home (2/12) and I don't think they will have the DVDs available immediately. But we will certainly work on it for Adam and Eva to see.

So Much Time

It seems like weekends are these big empty vacant holes of time waiting to be filled with a phonecall from mum, a coffee down the street with mum and dad, a pre-planned 'outing' of some sort or a spur of the moment visit to such and such. We get to Friday night and we have nothing on for the next two days. I hadn't realised just how much we do with mum and dad. No wonder we are missing them so much!

I picked up Ella's ballet concert costume last week and have included some lovely photos. She is going to be a pumpkin, we are just waiting on the Stem Cap to finsih off the outfit. Oh, and did I mention the TWELVE LEAVES of sequins I need to do? See in the close up shot the outlines of the leaves? Well, there are twelve of them and they all need to be filled with sequins. Not just the outlines. Mumble, mumble, bah.

We were talking about what we are going to do with Charlotte on concert day (Ella has two concerts on the same day, only 5 minutes in each) I am not taking Charlotte to sit in the audience with us, it will just be too hard. She couldn't even sit and enjoy a 40 minute Playschool concert that we went to without rummaging through other mums' bags looking for food. Ella piped up with 'I know, Nana and Papa can have Charlotte' We explained that Nana and Papa won't be back from overseas by then, and she said 'They might be, we won't really know until the time gets here'

Raff managed to lose his license for excessive amounts of speeding tickets (again!) Thank Goodness for the good behaviour bond. Now he just has to go 12 months with no traffic infringements at all, and he can live to drive another day.

We have all been yuckily sick over here. Raff actually had to cut a few days of work short to come home and look after us, as I was too ill to get out of bed really for a few days there. It seems like a real wasted week, we just did nothing. Though on the bright side! I have managed to lose 3 of those last 5 pesky kilos that have been hanging around my butt for the last 2 years. I found it very hard to eat much as I can't taste nor smell a single thing. Plus even my teeth hurt with this stupid sinus infection, that it just hasn't been worth the hassle of chewing.

I had a chat to Alexis and she has passed on her good wishes to all of my family spread across the globe. Her little boy has just turned 6 months - it goes by so very quick. Only 13 weeks until Charlotte is 2!

The quality of the last video link was really, really crappy. So I am going to try again!
Try this one....

Summer weather

It has been very warm this week. 30 degrees today apparently.
I hope you are avoiding the Dreaded Hayfever over there Dad, because it is nearly killing me over here. Stupid sinus infection.....
Just thought I would chuck in a picture of what our crazy Charlotte chose to wear during this weather.

trying video link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyYsUMgFJOo

and click went the braincells

Well this week has seen a huge leap in Charlotte's vocab. You know how it goes..."Gosh, she's nearly 21 months old and still not joining two words together"....and then voila!

So far we have had 'Nana, plane, up, vroom' and 'Rufus, woof, sit, down'(complete with stern face and little hand patting the ground) also 'Ella, cry, loud, ears' and after this evenings efforts 'Charlotte, fingers, sore, door' Yep, in the kerfuffle of an Ella Tantrum, Charlotte's fingers got totally slammed in the hinge edge of Ella's bedroom door. She had a dark blue indent running across all four fingers on her right hand. It really must have hurt, but I swear that girl has no sense of pain. Besides the initial crocodile tears she was over and done with it in seconds.

The weather has been really nice the last few days so I have been sending the girls outside to play quite a bit. So today all I heard was 'El-la ou-side' as she tugged on Ella's arm to drag her outside constantly. She is such a sweet little bundle. Coming up to me all the time for a 'squeeze, cuddle, kiss'

I wish I had the camera close by to get a shot of Ella sitting on a stool with two metal skewers 'knitting' her skirt. Still no luck on the next row of knitting for me.....

Rufus stole an apple out of Charlotte's hands today. I don't know if he thought it was a ball or what, but it frightened all involved. Hmmm.

I don't have any new photos to add. We are going out to Clonlea Park tomorrow with Mothers Group. (Well, Mothers Pair anyway.....only two of us free this week) So have already packed the camera as I hope to get some nice photos.

Oh and have you all checked out Pauls blog? Link -----> thataway

What a week!

I'm guessing that everyone has heard about Steve Irwin dying, but did you hear that Peter Brock died this week also? And Colin Thiele.... Very sad news all around, really.

Rufus has settled in really well, can't say the same for our poor cat Harry. We barely see her during the day and she will only enter the house through the front door. She is on constant alert when she is in the back room as she can hear Rufus snoring at the backdoor. Charlotte is of course just loving having Rufus here. And Ella is getting confident with him and today I watched her trying to unchain him and she was doing really well - actually touching him :)

I spoke to Tanya and she is doing pretty well. She is out of hospital, but still unable to do much at all. It doesn't look like breastfeeding is going to work out for them, though. She has 3 more scans they have to do that include th die injection that she can't breastfeed with. She sounded quite upbeat and glad to be home. She has a long list of volunteers to help out with baby care and home duties.

We had a very quiet Sunday today. It seems like ages since we spent a whole day at home. Charlotte slept for 3 1/2 hours!
We went to two of Ella's childcare friends birthday parties yesterday. I bumped in to a mum I used to work with years ago, two mums that I went to school with, 2 ballet mums, and one of the mums from Mother's Group. Small world.....


Just testing out a video link to see how it works. Ella and Raff on a camel ride at the Gawler Show.

She's famous!

Just a quick one to put up Ella's Bunyip photo. I have put in the colour version that I purchased from the Bunyip. She is on the far left in the bottom row.
And this is the entry that won it for her. What a genius!

And speaking of genius-ness... I finished my first 'row' of knitting. It is going to be a headband for Ella. Pity that for the life of me I cannot figure out how to add a second row (garter stitch)


Pretty skinny headband, hey?

Farewell again

Mum and Dads turn today.
The kids were great, Mum was teary.
I just got a text from mum saying that they have arrived in Auckland :)

We got a second chance at farewells once mum and dad were behind Customs, albeit through sound proof glass. Lots of charades to get ourselves understood, except of course for the universal language of Goodbyes.

Have included a photo of the girls keeping themselves busy being 'dolls in a toyshop'

Happy birthday!! Oh, and Father's Day

I turned thirty today, so of course Mum gave me knitting needles, some wool and a how-to-knit book. I can't wait to get in to it, maybe I will have a scarf ready for next Winter. I also was lucky enough to get lots of chocolates and a new mixer. Ella made me a picnic basket which I have included a photo of.

It was probably one of the better birthdays that I have had in recent years, but part of that is the luck of it falling on a weekend and also Father's Day + the kick up the pants that Raff received after the debacle that was Mother's Day this May. He took the girls shopping on Saturday, which was just fantastic of him, especially as they were all pretty cranky from spending Friday night sleeping (or not!) at mum's place. Backed up on Saturday morning with the everlasting tantrum that Ella was in the midst of when mum and dad dropped the girls of here on Saturday morning. It was a real doozy! I don't think mum and dad quite knew what hit them - though it probably flashed them back 20-odd years to that damn middle child of theirs.

Ella has been a real handful lately with tantrums and the constant talking back. It has really been testing the old parenting skills. In the last 4 years I don't think Raff and I have ever had to discuss parenting/discipline methods in any way, it all just kind of evolved naturally as each issue peaked and waned. But lately it seems like we are conversing on it non-stop.

Today in the car on the way to Nanna's for some strange reason she decided she had pepper up her nose and proceeded to sneeze repeatedly in her sister's face at about 200 decibels. Raff and I were having a mini debate in the front seat about how to get her to stop, as each reasonable request to 'sneeze a bit quieter, please' was met with the response of 'But, I have so much pepper inside my nose I have to sneeze as loud as I can to get it out' Perfectly reasonable answer.......if it were TRUE!! My ears were ringing, and my knee jerk reaction really was that I wanted to turn around and yell at her, but I could just see that escalating in to a huge issue.

Some calm, patient and imaginative discussion on the merits of muffled sneezing and instruction on how to pick the pepper out of her nose ensued, along with some super human effort on our part that included at lot of teeth clenching, deep breathing and tongue biting, and we were riding in silence. Until the ride home....but that's another Blog entry altogether :)

I have also included our effort for a Father's Day/birthday family photo. Charlotte really, really, really didn't want to leave the playground, and that is her mid-tantrum.