December 2011

Mum turned 70 on December 7th.  She looks good hey?  Every year my mum's extended family get together for a Xmas BBQ in early December, so we took the opportunity to also have a cake and to sing Happy Birthday to her.  The cake was a white chocolate bourban cake....quite more-ish.

Mum's b'day cake

 At the Xmas BBQ, the kids get a present out of the Santa Sack.  Tom was absolutely delighted with his present this year - an Angry Birds game.  He is just soooooo into Angry Birds at the moment.  It was the best 0.99c iPhone app we ever spent!!

A warm day in December....

 Last day of daycare and school.  Next year, Biddy leaves daycare behind and moves into 4yo kinder.  She is in the same complex,, but will have different teachers.

Biddy with Vicki

What a difference a year makes.  This photo of Tom makes him look like he is in about grade 2!  His first year of prep done and dusted!

With Judy Carr - one of the prep teachers

With Nicole McNamara - his prep teacher

With Angela Kelly, St Mary's school principal

At the end of the year, we lost one of our cats.  Felix was about 16yo and was on a steady slippery slope of health.  In fact, he had an abscess removed from his neck that he never really got over and in the end it was all a bit much.  However,  living on a farm means that you really need a cat and our other cat - Spare - is also getting on in age.  The kids and I thought that it would be good to give Mark a new cat for Christmas.  Problem: kittens are few and far between at this time of year.  Luck was on our side when a St Mary's school family had an unexpected litter.  The kittens were far too young to be picked up prior to Chrissy, so we went out the week before, took a photo and gave this pic and a sachet of kitten food to Mark for Christmas!  We were only going to get the orange one, but the tortise-shell one was just so damn cute.  Mind you, there was another one there as well that the family tried to give us!  But I think 2 is enough!

Fred and Ginger....except the sexes are the opposite way around!

 After a significant period of time with no poultry on farm, it was time to get some new chooks.  Mark's sister got onto a free range business that was closing up shop and had chooks for cheep (!  get it?!), so we grabbed 5.

October & November 2011

Silage season

 Mark's sister babysat a pony for her sister-in-law for a couple of months prior to Christmas (pony was a Santa gift and needed a hideout for a while!).  The pony was bombproof, but it was good to be able to have a little one ride it every now and then.  Biddy was MOST accommodating and was asked on Christmas Eve to go up and show the new owners how easily a child of 3yo could catch and ride him.  I was sort of sad to see the pony go because he was just so good and exactly what we are looking for.  Maybe the recipients will get sick of him??????

Friends of our's got married in November.  Despite some average weather, the wedding was beautiful...as were the invites and thankyou's which I made!! LOL.

Huthy and Bec

 Biddy turned 4yo on Christmas Day, but as per our custom of holding her party early, she celebrated it at the end of November.  This year, we had a circus themed party and Mark even got into the spirit by dressing up as a clown.  Mind you, some of the kids were scared sh*tless by him (6'4" strange man with funny hair and war paint on....I can understand!).  A terrible day weatherwise, but we had various games and prizes for them all plus all the usual party crap that you have!

The Birthday Girl

The new bike mummy and daddy gave her

Bella getting in on the action!

September 2011

Fathers Day

Footy day at school

Footy day at daycare

We took the kids to Ballarat for the September school holidays, mainly to catch up with family and to visit Sovereign Hill.  Three days there and it bucketed down for 2 of them!  Fortunately, the day we went to The Hill, it was sunny.  Been there before in the rain and it is not a kind place!

First casualty of the holiday

Don't have a heart attack.....

Ok.  It's been a long time coming (and me promising), but I am actually going to load something of relevance on here!  Like most things in life, the longer you leave your blog alone....unloved, unattended, ignored....the harder it is to return to it.  Quite frankly, I'm surprised that this blog did not meet someone else, run off and start a new life!  I would have if it were me.

But fortunately, we have a loyal blog - and hopefully, loyal blog followers - so I am just going to jump back into it and stop making excuses.  The next few blog entries are going to be snapshots of our lives from about last September to now.  Because I dumped these pics out of iPhoto and into a file on my computer to work on, they lost their dates.  So I really don't know which order they all should go.  But ain't that the fun of it?  You're just going to get a haphazard view of our lives, which in reality, is kinda what our lives are now....haphazard.

I also should mention....because it hasn't been mentioned on this blog yet.....that I am pregnant with #4.  This has contributed in a small way to my absence on here, because I kept meaning to catch up and then post about the pregnancy and keep it all neat and bundled.  But it never happened.  So some of the pics you will see are of me are with a distended tummy.  No, they are not pics of me after over-eating.  I AM in fact preggers!

As of today (23rd April), I have 2 weeks to go.  Yes, only 2 weeks.  So for those of you that have just caught up on the fact that I am indeed expecting, this is the shortest pregnancy you will probably encounter.

Sit back and enjoy the next few pictorial posts.

xx

What's going on?

I received a Christmas email a couple of weeks ago from a friend that I don't often keep in regular contact (well....it is regular - just once a year!) and he mentioned that I must have been busy of late as our farm blog had not been updated since September.

WHAT?!

And sure enough, visiting this morning, I note that I have not been on for some time.  YEs, life has been busy, but not THAT busy.

So, I will get thoughts together and be back with an update of the last quarter of 2011 and make a pledge to  be better at updating the blog (and for that matter, our farm website that needs some work) in 2012.

Be back later.....stay tuned.

A new skill

Our 15 month old daughter has recently taught herself a new life skill......feeding herself.  Which is hugely admirable because it means that if the worst ever was to happen and I ended up face down in the shower for any reason, I can assume that the kid won't starve in the time that it takes someone to come and rescue me...or her.  At the end of the day, it is every man for himself around here and the older kids wouldn't think to assist the baby to get some food, so it is great that she knows how to do it for herself.  However, I have to preface this by telling you that she feeds herself from the scraps out of the bin.

Occasionally, I will be engrossed in something (usually the computer) and I will get a waft of a food source that I remember from the previous night....or even the night before that.  On inspection, it will be Bella sitting near me with a 3 day old chop bone in her mouth, or yesterday's sandwiches that were retired from the older kid's lunchboxes.

Maybe it isn't so much of a survival skill in nutrition as it is a recyclable ethos.  Maybe?.....probably not.  I'm guessing that I'm just not feeding her when she wants it.

I'd best go and see what else she has pulled out of the bin, because she just waddled in here and passed me the strawberry tops that I cut off for Biddy's lunch.  No doubt, the she's found the KFC that I threw out this morning.

Time just gets away

Cripes.  It seems that I have badly neglected this blog.  I'm sure that I could come up with plenty of excuses, but really...at the end of the day, I have had a million things going on and something just has to give sometimes.

Things have been going along steadily here.  I can't believe that we are closing in on the remaining weeks of term 3 already.  Pretty soon, Tom will no longer be a little prepie, but will be a big grade 1 kid.  Sheesh. Next Thursday night we have the whole school performance and I understand that it is to centre around recycling.  The preps are chooks......it will be interesting to see what is in stall for us!

Health-wise, we have suffered a little around here.  Mark torn some ligaments in his shoulder and cracked a bone playing baseball.  Biddy has had some lingering virus which has seen her have to have 2 blood tests to try and work out what is wrong (still waiting on results), and Tom has battled an ear infection and bronchitis.  Bella has been snotty and I wouldn't be surprised if she also had a touch of bronchitis as she sounded exactly like Tom.  I have been fine until 2 days ago when I came down with a migraine.  Needless to say, we are hanging out for the hot weather to make its appearance and hopefully burn some of these germs off.

Mark's baseball team is in the grand final on the weekend.  Both the B and the B reserve Braves teams made it through which is a great effort.  The problem though, is that the B grade boys meet with Corio who absolutely THUMPED them 2 weeks ago.  Did I say thumped?  I should have said DECIMATED them.  It was a very poor result on the part of the Colac Braves with the mercy rule being invoked in the 7th innings because of the score.  21:1.  A shocker.  So from today, I am making it my mission to remind this score to Mark at every chance I get.  A sort of intimate heckling as you will.  Because if he can't take it from me in the privacy of our own home and convince ME that they are going to win, how the hell is he going to rally the fellas to face up to their biggest opponents?

The shame of it is, I have a class on Saturday, so I can't be there in person to provide some down to earth heckling if needed from the stands.  Pity.  Of course, they shouldn't need it and hopefully my one on one tirade will do its job over the next couple of days.

BRING IT ON!!!