Out of the mouths of babes

A couple of weeks ago, Mark was playing baseball and at one point in the game slid into home base, removing a substantial amount of skin from his knee and elbow. Whilst I like to think that he is being a bit soft about it all, I have to admit, it does look pretty painful. And it seems to be taking its sweet time to heal as well. Tom is not helping the healing process by taking part in nightly wrestling with Mark and knocking the scabs causing cracks and more bleeding.

I finally got sick of hearing about how sore the wounds were so I went out and bought some of that spray on bandaid. For those that have never seen it, it is sort of like a glue that covers wounds, supposedly acting like an invisible bandaid. It smells like nail polish remover. It should say on the can "use in a well ventiliated room" because after using it, I could smell it for an hour.

Anyway, Mark was reading Tom a bedtime story when I presented him with the can. Mark sticks his leg and arm out for me to spray. Obviously it not only smells like nail polish remover, but also stings like it too in cuts, because Mark complained bitterly about it. I retorted by telling him not to be such a girl and to just put up with it.

Tonight, I was getting Bridie ready for bed and Mark was getting Tom dressed after having a bath. Tom looks at Mark's scabby knee and says "ouch Daddy, sore baseball knee. Mummy will put some spray on it and then you'll be a girl".


Ha ha ha.....out of the mouths of babes!!!!

The faze continues

Each term, Tom's daycare centre runs a particular theme. This term it is caterpillars and bugs, and they are also learning about road safety. I think this is great, as someone other than me, gets to go over and over and over the same topics. This is great, of course, until it comes home.

Over a year ago now, one of the topics was dinosaurs. Tom had never seen toy dinos before, never watched a DVD with them on, never uttered their names, but ever since 2nd term 2007, our house (and our lives) are filled with the giant lizards. So much so, that I am starting to wonder if there are any more things that can be manufactured with dinosaurs featuring on them. It appears so.

Watching a show on the history channel on Austar the other night about dinosaurs, I learnt that they have recently seen a big revival. They apparently make more comebacks than John Farnham. I just thank my lucky stars that my son happened to be a toddler in one of those comeback periods. I mean, whatever would we fill our lives, our house and Tom's bed with?

What amazes me, is the vast, VAST array of merchanidise that can have a dinosaur slapped on it. Our dino dollar has been spent on doona covers, sheets, books, toys (of all sizes), lollies, clothes, gumboots, DVD's, web downloads, prints, cups, and drink bottles. These do not include the things that other people give Tom or make for him. My mum is making a quilt for his bed and it features about 15 of the buggers. My aunt made him a mozzie canopy with them on it.

I cannot complain too much, as I have contributed to the faze myself. But in my defense, I didn't know how far reaching this would end up. For Tom's 2nd birthday, I implored mum to cut out these huge dinos out of plywood and I painted them. They were initially just for party decoration, but they ended up coming out so well, that we have put them up on his walls in his room. And of course, it is me, not Tom, that buys all the books and dino paraphernalia. And it was me that suggested that we take a day trip to the Otway Fly (Lavers Hill) to see the dinosaur walk that they have constructed.

We set off this morning telling Tom that we would see some dinosaurs and he was so excited. The walk from the car to the visitor's centre is a short walk, and as you approach, you spot your first dino.....the King Lizard himself. The T-Rex. Tom takes one look and FREAKS!!! It is one thing to watch them on DVD or to look at them in books, but it is a hell of a lot different when one is towering over you and you are just a small boy. It was all we could do to get him to walk past it.

Thinking that he would warm to the idea of seeing them up close, we started off for the "Prehistoric Path". Oh God, how wrong we were. Even his 2nd favourite (T-Rex is his fav), Stegosaurus, did nothing to quell his nervousness. He hung around Mark's neck like some expensive peice of jewellery. But after abandoning the dino walk and taking the tree top walk, he was ready to face them again. I mean, he'd mastered walking high in the tree canopy on a walkway that you could see through. No mean feat for an almost 3yo!

As the photos show, he did put on a brave face and eventually went up to them, but there was no way he was going anywhere near that T-Rex!

I asked Tom what he wanted for his upcoming 3rd birthday party. "Dinosaurs" was the answer. But what about pirates? Or cowboys? Or underwater creatures? Please Thomas, anything but dinosaurs! But no, dinosaurs it firmly, stubbornly was to be. So I got out my pencils and good paper and set to work creating some invites based around the good ol' dino theme. At least I can recycle the decorations from last year.

So after about 15 months of living with this faze, I'm not sure that I can call it a faze anymore. It doesn't seem to be waning at all; his interest is as strong today as it ever was. And good on him. Maybe it'll be something that he creates a career out of. Maybe it'll bring him fame and fortune. And maybe it'll all be over next month. Who knows. But I do know that when (if) it all comes to an end, the toys, books, DVDs, clothes etc.. that we have will be no good to pass onto anyone else, because they are the best loved, most well worn kids things we have in our house.

With the raptor

With "baby" steggy

Being protected by daddy from T-Rex

Birthday invites

A day of firsts

10.5mm of rain overnight. VERY happy with this. That amount of rain will kick things off again nicely.....the pastures were starting to feel the effects of a dry start to the winter period.

The freezer full of meat has raised its own unique problems:

1. accessing select pieces of meat from a chest freezer that is packed CHOCKERS; and

2. no available space to store 'normal' stuff that usually gets kept in the freezer (such as chicken, bread, butter, ice-cream etc).

As a result, a second freezer purchase was in order, especially seeing as Mark has alluded to the fact that an annual kill might be on the cards. So if I am looking at needing to store vast amounts of meat on a regular basis, then I can't do it in the freezer we have. Or at least not with that one alone. So I bought an upright frost free one and it is, as I type, chilling nicely so I can pack it tomorrow. The upright is going to address the issue of storage and the ability to locate a piece of T-Bone without the need for a microchip, GPS reader and the local SES brigade. And it also takes up less space.

Family-wise, we had a couple of firsts today that should be noted. Tom went for his very first haircut this morning. Yes, he is 20-something days off his 3rd birthday and he has never had a haircut. He was lucky to have ANY hair by the time he was 2yo! I had to laugh though at the amount of hair that was removed. Almost bugger all. It was all we could do to collect some and keep it as a memento. Here I was holding an envelope under the scissors, trying to catch every strand of hair, hoping that no-one sneezed or breathed too deeply and blow it away! Although it was really not much off, it was the dangly wispy bits and it does look a bit neater. And Tom thinks it was just wonderful. Mark and I both prepped him before he went in and although he was a little shy to start with, he happily sat on my knee and let the girl do her job.

1) Prior to the haircut ; 2) Getting started (note how long the top is!)

3) Enjoying the treatment

4) The finished result

The second first we had today was that Bridie sat in the high chair for the very first time. We normally have her in the kitchen with us when we are eating dinner, but she is placed in her rocker. Because it is on the floor, she squarks and grizzles because she is just not in the action. But to place her on your knee when you are trying to eat...forget it! Especially now she is making a grab at everything. So Mark put her in the highchair for a bit and she loved it. So from tomorrow, we are going to have Tom sitting in a bumper seat (portable high chair) on one of the dining chairs and she can have the high chair. Oh, my kids are growing up too fast.......

Houston...there IS a problem!

We have some movement with the website issue. I ended up speaking directly with an IT person at our web host and it turns out that even he couldn't make the website design do what it is meant to do. Thank God it wasn't just me. But let's face it. It must be one monster problem if the IT guy for the organisation that developed the webpage design programme can't fix it. He has put the problem onto another department and escalated the priority to high, but I can see that despite paying for a website, we are going to be a while away from actually having one that people can see.

On a more positive note, we now have a freezer full of meat after a beast we had slaughtered a couple of weeks ago, is now cut up. Funny thing is, we don't actually eat a stack of beef in our house - we are more lamb and chicken people. Ok, I am more of a chicken and lamb person and Mark just gets what is dished up! With a freezer full of meat though, I can see a few more beef recipes turning up on our plates over the coming months.

Bagging meat cuts for the freezer

Tom 'helping' me to bag up mince

Easy to use??? Yeah right!

As I mentioned previously, I am having all sorts of problems in getting our website up and going. It seems to be an ongoing saga, spanning a period of months now. Back in 2004, Mark and I went over to USA to attend the World Dairy Expo in Madison. We took with us some blurbs on our business to share with others, but thought that it would be a good idea to get a website up and going so we could expand a lot more on our business and link people to that site. Plus, we host a great many tours on our farm (including international visitors), and again, this website could provide a point of reference for them when they got back home.

Sounds like a reasonable logical idea? Yes. Is it as easy as it sounds to get it up and going? No.

We started off with a basic website which served our purposes for only a very short period of time. It is very true that you get what you pay for, and we needed more than what we were obviously paying! So after a couple of years, we changed to another plan that is supposed to give us greater flexibilty and access to more templates and page configurations. Sounds great and the demo stuff I have seen is quite good. But it isn't working out quite like I thought.

First, we had an issue with 2 websites being up and going under the one domain name. Many phone calls and emails back and forward eventually sorted that out. Now I am finding that the website builder that I am using is playing funny buggers and after almost constructing the site to how I want it, now wants to move pages around, delete pages and constantly give me error messages. The design is almost back to square 1. I can't even go live because it just isn't anywhere near right.

And trying to get some help from our website host is proving harder than landing that rover thingy on Mars. In fact, I reckon that there is a lot more feedback from Mars. Everything is done via online help, so after posting my problem, I have to sit around and wait for someone to respond. Waiting....waiting.....waiting. I have appended jobs just to get a response. I did get a consultant one time that seemed to actually have looked at my site and gave me some specific actions to follow. I happened to be sitting at the computer at 5am when she initially posted, so I was able to follow her suggestions and then post back when it didn't work. She posted again, but still I had problems. She obviously went off shift, because I have not heard from them again and that was Monday morning.

I think it is time to pull in the big guns, admit defeat and just get someone to do it all for me.

Craiglands in Tasmania

I forgot to mention in my first entry, that the photo that is the header of the blog is actually one of our old farm pictures. We are fortunate that we have a family history of excellent record keeping (this has come in very handy in recent years when registering cows), and we are able to trace our farming roots back many generations. Prior to farming in Colac, the dairy was operational in Tasmania and in England before that. The name "Craiglands" comes from the farm in England, although I'll have to do more research as to how the name originated. When I get all my various history pages together in front of the computer, I'll update the linkges. But that photo in the header is actually a cow and calf from the Tasmanian farm around 1900. The farm no longer exists and is pretty much Launceston suburbia now, but there are street names that reflect our former ownership of the land (eg. Craiglands Court).

Mark and I sometimes have a chuckle over some of these old photos. We would die if our cows today looked like the one in the picture! We have just come so far in not a really long period of time. Mark has done a slide show on the past 100 years of dairying (for a presentation that his dad gave to a local services club) and he incorporated many photos from our own farm over this time. It is so interesting to see the differences.

I love taking photos and making sure that things are recorded (this blog is part of that info recording), so it is certainly my intention of preserving old photos, records and information, along with making sure that present day stuff is recorded and stored correctly. The advent of the digital camera and online storage is an absolute boon for the amateur historian. I am constantly taking photos around the farm and in my 8 years on the farm, I can safely estimate that I have taken hundreds and hundreds of photos, trying to capture different moments in time. I do this, because I want to believe that in another 100 years, when we are no longer here any more, that one of our decendants that maybe still involved in farming (or not), can look at how we did things and have a chuckle about how antiquated we were and think about how far they have come over not such a long period of time.

On your marks, get set........GO!

Here we are. Embarking on yet another facet of our farm business. A blog. I know that many many of our friends and family have blogs; some for business and some for personal reasons. But we have never gotten into it. And I don't really know why, because we embrace all things computer related and technology driven on our farm, so something like this is a logical step. Maybe it has to do with time management than anything else. Or maybe it is because I have been battling with creating our website.....that is another story which I'm sure will be updated in moderated language on here!

But seriously, our website is only going to handle so much in order to remain focused on the business. And although our business and family lives are intricately intertwined, it would be nice to keep them somewhat separate for the purposes of updating goings-on. So we have delved into this. Hopefully we can keep it up.

It is our intention to use this forum to give you a sneak peek into our lives that involve more than just the farm business. Yes, we do have interests beyond the farm gate! Mark is an avid baseballer playing for the Colac Braves, and over the past 3 years, I have gotten heavily into scrapbooking. Tom attends daycare and swimming and Bridie is simply content to live on booby milk for the time being.

We have had a few family events over the past 5 months or so, starting with Bridie's birth. For those that don't know, she arrived on Christmas Day at 1.18pm. She just turned 5 months, and I honestly don't know where the time has gone. It seems to have gone faster this time round than with Thomas. Mark turned 40yo at the start of March and we had a huge shin-ding for him. It was a dress up - come dressed as a movie character or movie star - and we had a fantastic night. We had Jack Sparrows, Shreks, Mary Poppins, King Arthur, James Bond, Austin Powers....the list goes on. Mark dressed as Indiana Jones and I went as Marilyn Munroe from "Gentlemen prefer Blondes". Tom went as Robin Hood and Bridie went as Jack Jack from "The Incredibles". Top night.

A couple of weeks back we held Bridie's christening. Like her brother before her, she was christened in Mark's christening gown. It is a lovely family tradition that we have begun and I sincerely hope that our kids will carry it on in future generations.

Tom will be 3 at the start of July. We are tossing up what to give him for his birthday as we already have a few presents bought and put away. We thought of maybe getting a dog and sort of giving it to him for his birthday (it will be mummy and daddy looking after it anyway), but on investigation of getting a particular breed (Australian terrier), it is looking like we won't get one this side of Christmas. I have to say that it doesn't faze me all that much. I can wait!

The next big bash slated for the year is in September for my aunt's 50th. Bernie is much closer in age to me than she is to my mum, so we are more like sisters. I am quite looking forward to this milestone in her life. She is humming and haaaing about having a party....I think she should. I still have a few months to work on her.

Anyway, this is probably enough for my first post, but I thought I'd show you a couple of layouts (LO) that I have recently completed that I love for very different reasons. The first is of Bridie at around 8 weeks. The photo was taken by Wal Slow from South Western Studios in Colac, Victoria. His work is absolutely beautiful and Jan (his wife and business partner) certainly knows how to get the best out of babies and kids. I should also say that this LO is not entirely mine. I have done what is known in the craft as "scraplift" (taken someone else's LO and copied it). Whilst mine looks different, I cannot pretend that it is solely mine. So, hats off to Penny Hackney, NSW (published in Scrapbooking Memories) for giving me the inspriation for this one!



The second layout is one I did of my mum when she was about 6 months old. This layout has been rattling around in my head for some time now; I knew which photo I would use and sort of how I wanted it to look, but I dithered around getting the 'right' pieces for the layout. But I am VERY happy with how it turned out.