It's official

Yep, she's a school girl.

Video of Lucy

Not much happening over here. Same old, same old. Feed baby, drive eldest to school, feed baby, pick eldest up from school, feed baby, sleep, repeat.
Lucy has started smiling and I managed to catch a glimpse of it on video, so thought I would upload them.





I also finally got a half decent photo of the three girls!

Photos by Phillippa

I received the disk of photos yesterday. Unfortunately on the day the photos were taken, Ella and Charlotte were unable to be in the same room as each other without kicking, biting, pinching, pushing and yelling at each other, let alone actually being photographed lovingly together. So only managed one photo of all 3 girls...

A perfect day

It started with waking at 6:10 this morning and realising that Lucy had slept right through from 10pm, then when I got her up to feed she grinned at me for the first time - one of those beautiful whole face smiles with shiny eyes that only a newborn can do. She fed and went back to sleep and so did I, until 8:30 when Charlotte woke. Raff and Ella were already on their way to school.
My beautifully well-behaved helpful Charlotte was back after a fairly turbulent month, so we went for a walk down the street. It was one of those beautiful winter days with blue skies and just a touch of spring on the breeze. I was feeling very grateful for my bodies ability to heal and loved getting out and stretching the old muscles again.
Lucy slept most of our excursion except for a brief awakening to jump on the scales for a weigh in. She now weighs a beautifully chubby 5.3kg.
Charlotte and I sat on a step on Adelaide Road and watched the cars go by. Charlotte with her dried mango, me with my apple and Lucy with her breastmilk.
I achieved everything on my list today which always feels good.
I had a cup of tea with my mum.
I had my first night putting the girls all to bed by myself, as Raff had a meeting to go to, and it went swimmingly. Charlotte asleep at 6:30, Ella asleep at 7 and Lucy has slept most of the evening, which sure beats last nights screaming match...
My husband came home with a $900 phone that he won.
Life is good.

A rather spotty, yet still beautiful Lucy - she will be 4 weeks old in two days!

A step away

Ella started school today. She loved it! She was super impressed that she learnt something new on her very first day, too (the Indonesian word for spider!)
She had a nervous start and the first photo that I have put up doesn't quite show the extent of the death grip that she had on Charlotte's hand.
She was so brave though, and didn't look back once she gave us all a super big squeezy hug (I didn't think she was going to let go of Charlotte, she held on for that tight for that long)
I got to her classroom early to pick her up this afternoon and her class was still over in the Indonseian room. I watched her walking back across the yard surrounded by her classmates and in that moment had a flash of me as an outsider peeking in on her world, rather than being the centre of it *waah* She still needs me, right?

Straight after school drop off I met a few of the mums from my Mother's Group so that we could all have a coffee, a chat and a cry about our babies starting school. Those women have been wonderful companions over the last five years. I think my journey into motherhood would have been just that little bit harder and a touch more lonely if I didn't have them all there to share the highs and lows. We have all learnt a little bit off each other here and there, but probably moreso we have all cemented our own way of parenting and been able to confidently do so without being judged.
We are an interesting mix, and I am unsure that we would have all gotten along so well in any other setting. It seems odd that the only link is that we all had our first children in mid 2002. Ella was 10 weeks old when we all met and it has been a privilege to share her and her nuances with these great women. (Miss you, Jacki!!!)
Our monthly child free dinners have always left me feeling reassured that most behavioural things with children are generally age appropriate and pass by so quickly in the grand scheme of things. I mean, really, now that she is five, can I even remember that crazy frustrating fight to get her to lay still to put a nappy on? Or the constant, constant breastfeeding? The thought that she would never sleep anywhere other than tucked up in my (rather sore!) arms? The horror that she was in the car - oh, the screaming! -? The pain of labour? The euphoria of birth? The hopelessness of non-stop crying?(mine, not hers) The emptied out Tupperware cupboards and bookshelves - again? The weaning? The mess of solids? The vomiting?

Will I ever forget the milky smell? The softness of her baby hair? The first successful breastfeed? The snuggles in bed? Her first steps? Her first giggles? The bliss of watching a sleeping baby?

Aah, thank goodness for little sisters! I get to do it all over again.

Our Lucy

Yep, totally slack over here, but 3 weeks and one day ago our Lucy was born.
My mum has blogged brilliantly about it @ spendingyourinheritance.blogspot.com . One day I will get my head around it all and write it all down, for now it is enough that Lucy is with us safe and sound. She really is a glorious baby. I am totally unbiased in saying that she is gorgeously perfect in every way. From the Stomaci head of hair to the Stomaci love of sleep!
Our older girls are infatuated. The honeymoon is nowhere near over.
I had an online friend take some photos of my girls on Wednesday. She is mailing the disk out to me, so I hope to have some great photos to put up very soon.

This is just one of Charlotte and Lucy. It totally captures how enamoured Charlotte is with 'Little sister Lucy' as she calls her all day long.

We haven't been doing much other than existing. I can't wait until our loungeroom is finished so that I can put up photos. I love that room so much.

Ella had her 5th birthday and mum took her to see Cirque du Soleil. She really enjoyed the outing.

Our Lucy

Ella on her birthday

Ella at Cirque du soleil

First school visit

Does she look happy?
I overheard her talking to our cat just before we had to leave. She was in her school clothes and was saying 'Harry, you probably don't recognise me now. Probably it is the school clothes, but it is also that I am different all over now. I am a school girl now. Even though it is only a very quick visit today, soon I will be going every day. I will miss you. You have been a good cat'

She was extremely nervous (so was I!) but she did great and is really happy with her classroom, her friends, her teachers and knowing where the toilets are and where to put her bag. I sat in the car and cried - damn hormones!

New room

Inside the cupboards - look at all that space!!





Charlotte's bed


Ella's bed




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THE room is done !!

The girls room is finished !! It has been a long time coming, trying to steal bits and pieces of time here and there to finalise it, but it is so so worth it. All I want to do now is get a rug of some sort for the floor and the man from Hills robes has to give us our door back (he had to take one of the mirrored doors in lieu of payment :p - we had a bit of trouble getting the money through to them, over daily card limit etc)

When it was just Ella's bedroom.










I will make another entry with photos of the new look room in just a tick.

Now our next room to tackle is the dining room/office. It is going to become our lounge room. We had grand plans to paint over last weekend (Rachel had our girls all day Sunday - thanks again!) but the 'little' cracks that we needed to patch, kind of turned in to this


and this

The joys of an old house....

so now we wait for Raff to get the stuff to fill the gap and of course it is 10pm and he is still not home from work, so tonight is out of the question.
All the office/dining furniture is crammed in to what is to be the baby room, though the drawers have some baby clothes in, we have nappies and the bassinette is assembled - what more could a baby need?! (only 22 more sleeps until D day...)

Baby is growing wonderfully well and I am feeling great. My haemoglobin levels have actually increased, (105 to 107) which is a first for me. Body is holding out pretty well, considering the size of my bump - midwife says I am heading towards a 9 pound baby :) Anyone got any ideas for a name?!

She did it !!

Ella that is. Passed up to the next swimming class. It has been a loooong time coming, but she looks great in the water and is very very happy. We now have to change to *sniff* after school lessons. She is now a Seahorse :D.

Speaking of school....we went and got her school uniform today and she has her first transition visit tomorrow. Her new teacher came to visit at the kindy yesterday and it turns out that her kindy teacher (Sandra) has managed to get Ella into an R-1 class. Very, very happy with that, as I wasn't really looking forward to six full terms of Reception alone. She will be in with only 3 other kindy kids and her closest friend Taylah won't be by her side, but I think it will be wonderful for her to be extended a little bit, both academically and socially.

Real concrete!!

Oh, the excitement!!
Who would have thought concrete could bring such joy?!
On Sunday morning, Raff peeled back the carpet in Charlotte's old room (soon to be Sprout's room) and found some beautiful, fresh, non-sticky, non-deteriorated, perfect underlay. And under the beautiful, fresh, non-sticky, non-deteriorated, perfect underlay? Concrete! Smooth, clean, even, level concrete - happy dancing all around.
So from peeling back the carpet until laying the final plank, it took us about 5 hours in total - the girls were home with us helping, which possibly extended the time a touch.
Oh, and did I mention that particular room is perfectly square? With flat concrete? Wow! Soooo much easier than the girls room.


Almost finished product - still have to finish up the edges with some beading of some sort.


And this is what it looked like under the carpet in the first room we did - awful, hey?

Mmm, and did I mention that we still haven't actually received the money from the bank? 5 weeks today since we applied. Buggers. Tomorrow, apparently :)

A wedding.

We went to a wedding on Saturday, a school friend of Raff's. It was an absolutely glorious day, around 22 degrees. I had frantically rushed around on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning looking for decent jackets for Ella and I to wear on the night, as the reception was aboard the Dolphin Explorer at Port Adelaide. Of course it was beautiful weather and I wore short sleeves the whole night and didn't even look at my jacket. Ella was too busy dancing with her 'groovy hips' see video to notice the cold. Charlotte hasn't been well since last Sunday, so I had her rugged up as she wanted to live up on the deck of course.

The bride and groom were crazily in love . They have a 22 month old daughter and it was only her and our girls at the wedding. Our girls were fantastic and we had many many comments on our 'obviously great parenting' which was lovely :)

The girls got to take ALL the balloons home from the reception, which was great. NOT! as we had taken Raff's car and there was just no room for all the balloons and no arguing with two very sleepy children.

Ella Charlotte and Rachel (flowergirl)


Some of the balloons



Sleepiest little girl in the world - zonked for nearly 14 hours straight about 10 minutes after this photo was taken.

School !!!

I received a note at kindy this week saying that Ella's school transition visits start next week!! That has snuck up rather quickly...

The plants mum and dad dropped off for us to look after are going wonderfully. It has been a wet gusty wintery day here today so I went out to check the plants hadn't blown over and found the strawberries bitten off the plant...by Charlotte. I can just imagine her out there on her hands and knees. Crazy kid.

Belly shot

Raff snapped this one last week. Pretty good, as the light covers up the stretch marks.

We have floor

After a pretty intensive effort over Saturday night and all day Sunday we managed to get the floating floorboards down in the girls' bedroom.
It looks really good. It was just Raff and I working on it and we both deserve a pat on the back. We just have to work out how to get the skirting boards back on...

All that is left to do in their room now is put up the fairy border, affix skirting boards and find a little joiner thingamy for where the slate meets the floorboards at their doorway.

I will post a heap of before and after photos when we are done (furniture arrives 30/05) but in the meantime here is a corner of the room!



I have decided the only way to keep up blogging is to throw random bits of information out there. I decided today that I overthink most things way to much - it helps to come to a revelation like that when you spend 12+ hours cooped up in an empty room DIY-ing with a husband that doesn't really do forward thinking ;)

For those watching at home, we have taken the house off the market and the bank has been kind enough to throw a large some of money our way, with very little begging needed, which we are planning on spending all around the house. All the rooms will be getting painted, built in wardrobes will be going in the bedrooms and laundry, floating floorboards in the bedrooms and lounge room, new beds, new dining table and even a new couch. My shopping list is as long as my arm and I can't wait to get started on it!
Do you think we can get it all done in the next 5 weeks!?

Big thanks to Rachel for having our kids today, we really couldn't have got anywhere near as much done with them helping us. The kids looked like thay had a ball!



Hope your birthday was great, Adam, hope you could feel the birthday hugs and hear the random outbursts of 'Happy Birthday, Adam' from our girls.

Bugs

Ella has been learning all about insects at kindy this term. She has loads and loads of odd information that she can relay to you about bugs.
Did you know spiders bodies are covered in an oily layer, so that they don't stick to their own webs?
Did you know that spiders legs are covered in tiny little hooks that mean they can't get blown off their webs on windy days?
Did you know that spiders can't chew like humans can? They have to squirt poison in to the flies body until all their insides turn to liquid and then they slurp their insides out.
Did you know butterfiles don't have mouths, they have a probiscus?
Ladybirds are great insects, because they eat aphids, which eat roses.
She is a fountain of knowledge, so I guess it should have come as no surprise tonight that while we were laying on her bed reading stories, and she had her hand on my stomach and suddenly felt the baby move, she said 'Wow, that's a big bump,it must be Sprout's thorax!'

Salee turns one

We went to visit Alexis and her little boy, Salee, on Sunday. They are living at Tailem Bend for the moment, so we sat in the car for 2 hours to get there, which wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. The girls are getting to a wonderful age and they sang songs happily most of the way.
Ella in particular was very impressed that we were 'in the distance' as we started driving up the freeway through the hills. She always gazes at the hills and calls them 'the distance'.

We had a lovely BBQ on the river side watching the ferry go over and back and over and back.... Charlotte was enthralled watching a young boy catching big carp on a handline. She is a child that looks at the world with total wonder. She loves animals so much. She loves bugs and has no real fear of anything (I say 'real' fear, as she loves to copy her big sisters' screams when she sees a bug, and insists that she is 'scared', but truthfully would just pick a huntsman up and tuck it in her pocket if I let her) She loves nature and is always filling her pockets with different types of rocks and leaves and sticks.
She really is unique, and makes me laugh out loud many times each day with her wackiness. She loved the trees that were full of screeching corellas and the giant cricket on the toilet floor that was losing it's fight amongst a gazillion ants.

Alexis kept commenting over and over how much Charlotte looks like me. The two girls are so different it is bizarre. Even odd things like their feet - Ella has Raff's lanky feet, complete with a second toe that is longer than her big toe. Charlotte has my stumpy little toes and odd toenails.

Alexis made a cake for her boy. I let her know that that was the first real rite of motherhood. What do you think? Blue jelly and chocolate cake?


I think Lex's mum didn't have 100% faith in her cake making ability, so this was the back up one ;)


It was great to see Lex again. She looks great and I was happy to see that her boy was in cloth nappies! We have known each other for 15 years! Crap, that makes me feel old....



Ella went wild with the camera and took about 50 odd close-up photos of all kinds of things. This is the family shot that she took. Thank goodness for digital cameras :p



All up it was a lovely day. I had forgotten how peaceful it is to be at the river. It was a well earned time-out for us all.

Odd child

So last week I was in the toilet and I heard a little voice saying 'Help me. Stuck' I wandered outside to see this


I have no idea what she was thinking, but inside the pillowcase was a Charlotte, two blankets, 3 baby dolls and a partridege in a pear tree.

I took it off her head to find this gorgeous sight

May as well throw in a photo of the Big Sister while I am here
Oh, and this is the view that I get of my 26 week pregnant tummy

Songs for Adam and Eva

I know I really need to do an update....but in the meantime here is my gorgeous grown up girl


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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81wbhsPllw8

Meet Sprout

We had our ultrasound today. You know what that means? We are at the halfway mark of this pregnancy. Quickest pregnancy in history, I say.
Ella came along with us and she did enjoy it, but I am glad I packed enough snack and drinks and books for her to look at during the boring moments.
For some reason the baby has been named Sprout, it has just kind of stuck. We have never been ones for cutesie names for foetuses, but Sprout it is.
And nope, we didn't find out the sex. I am always sooooo tempted to peek as the sonographer scans down the body, but always look away at the last minute.

All seems well, I have an appointment with the midwives on Tuesday, so I suppose we will find out for sure then.

I will leave you with this photo of what us Aussies have to do to keep cool in these times of droughts and water restrictions.