A Wonder Full Day at the Airshow

Kookaburra was let loose with the camera at the airshow on the weekend and of the gazillion shots these are probably the best! I was so surprised he didn't take more, right down to including the tarmac of the runway.


This was a Dadda day. All the men headed off to a neighbouring town about an hour and a half away while I had a rest and recoup day visiting friends and hanging out at home.

Fulltime Mumma's need a little time to refresh!


Kangaroo at the wheel of the Rocket Car. Check out the back!


An eye for the sky? Our boys get a closer look at the inside of a cockpit. I'm guessing there was a little glare that day, he he.


A snapshot of the future perhaps.


Those tricky planes tearing up the sky.



Our boys really do love the police vehicles.


Ahhh... yeh.... sad faces in the back of the paddy wagon. Maybe Dadda was all worn out after all the questions, excitement and chattering and the constant buzzing of ideas?! Two little boys nattering endless can wear us out :).

Our little men really did have a wonder full day at the airshow and sharing it with their Dadda was super way to grow a little closer together.

Home

Today has been slow... scratch that.... today has been relaxed! I've dusted, vacuumed and washed the floors, later after rests - because boy do we ever need a rest today due to so many late nights - I'll clean the bathroom. The rugs from my boys rooms are downstairs waiting for their turn to go through the wash after the couch covers. Our home is virtually all clean and tidy awaiting our weekend to start with Dadda. This morning we're all a little bit ratty so I've canceled art with the school this afternoon in favour of a completely restful day at home. Which by the way, I'd like to introduce you to!

She is a beautiful home and I'm so grateful that our family has landed here for a while.

We don't have a lot else planned today.

They've both completed their ten minutes of music today thanks to the Music Ace program and Kookaburra has spent some of his morning discovering the delights of Matilda by Roald Dahl. I'm so proud of him. Reading has been a enormous struggle and yet now he breezes through four chapters in one sitting. He's just finished George's Marvelous Medicine also by Roald Dahl and thought it was devilishly funny. I know my boy. He's a cackle head who loves to laugh at nonsense and the ridiculous so I thought these books would strike a chord with him. I've also sought out copies of most of Mr Dahls' books and they're waiting on his bookshelf for each of their turns to be read.

Well it's time for me to make lunch for our little lads and get a cup of coffee.... and toothpicks to hold my eyes open whilst I read to them ;) then we'll nap together and play our afternoon away. Sure is a hard life ;)!

What Could It Be?

It's been a while since I've gotten around to posting but here we finally are. Moved and settled into our new home. It's lovely and bright with lots of windows and a massive backyard in a quiet street not far from town so we can maintain our busy lives.


For the most part everything that is necessary (and more) has been unpacked and we even have a few photos up on the walls. What I really wanted though is to make better use of this great kitchen bench space we have now. I had originally wanted to title this post 'What's in the box?' but my boys were so quick to rip open the packaging that that title quickly become impossible as the box was gone and they had moved straight onto assembly. Can you guess what they are?



My happy handy men.



A little supervision from Merlin.


One done, one to go.


Yep. Bar stools! My boys can hang out in the kitchen and do their lesson work or bake or just eat their meals at the bench whilst I double duty getting other things done whilst being in the same room as them. Previous to this my boys were doing this sort of thing at the table in the dining room in the next room. A new home. A few changes. We're really enjoying right now.

Movin' On Up and Out

Our time in Little House is nearing to a close. There have been a few issues since living here - the biggest being the mold we can smell in our kitchen in the food prep area - that we've given the owner a good deal of time to resolve but the outcome has been that they aren't going to fix it. So, valuing our health, we've made the tough decision to move on. It's difficult to do as we really love our little yellow house in it's pretty and overgrown garden. Little House has been our hideaway for the past year where we've been able to heal from our pretty dramatic existence in our last home and we've discovered that we actually like living in town and maybe building and living out of town, be it just ten minutes, may not be for us. We're working through our options but if our five acres was to have a reasonable offer on it tomorrow I think we would be happy to be free of it and hunt for a suitable home in town.

With our impending move we've also decided that it's an end of an era for our old upright piano that we bought three years ago from our Hospital Museum. We have upgraded to a digital piano which is actually in pitch! It's made a world of difference to my playing already too, which I'm so thankful for because I have my Grade Two exams in September. Our boys are having a ball with it also. Kangaroo likes to play the concert demo and pretend he's playing it.

Hooray and Yay! Welcome :D

We praise him and encourage him to accept the accolades. He meanwhile grins and continues to lightly bounce his fingers over the keys.


For Mr E the new keyboards absolute stand out best feature is that it only weighs about seventy five kilo's and can be easily moved by the two of us and it won't need retuning at the other end. Our lovely upright on the other hand cost us three hundred dollars each time we had it moved and then needed to be professionally tuned as well. It wasn't a good enough piano to deserve that sort of money spent on it.

Goodbye :(

The upright has gone to another family just like us. They have very little musical experience and they want something to try and see if the children (or maybe their Mumma? :) would like to play before investing in a serious instrument.

So this is it. We're clearing out the things we don't need once again. The house is full of boxes, packed and ready to go. Little House is beginning to have the empty echo that comes with pictures being removed from the walls and books packed away out of our book shelves. Soon there will nothing at all left to soak up the sound. The house will stand bare awaiting it's final clean and a last goodbye.



But it's not all sad. Not by a long shot. Our new home has a lovely bright airy feel with a massive backyard for our boys to play in and a garden in the front to plant some flowers come spring. And the kitchen is definitely mold free!

A Pratically Perfect Festival :)

My sweet little clown. Dressed up to visit a friend.
On the way over we stopped at the bakery and even
though we were parked right in front, Kangaroo insisted
on hopping out to show people and surprise them.

The real problem with not blogging regularly is that part of our story goes a little bit missing. It doesn't take long until some major happenings haven't been journalled and I find myself uploading a ridiculous amount of photo's to share and trying to figure on how best to tell our tale.

The longer I live in our little town the more I fall in love with it and the friends and connections we're making. It has an interesting history and it proudly lays claim to it's heritage and indulgently celebrates it, beauty and warts and all. The interesting thing about our town is that the author of Mary Poppins, PL Travers, was apparently born here which has led to our town laying claim to 'our Mary' and has turned this connection into a celebration and a festival, culminating in The Mary Poppin's Festival on the first weekend of July.

At the park our talented friends volunteered their time for a week before the festival to create stunningly, magical pavement art creations which awed and amazed crowds on the Sunday of the festival. There are more beautiful pictures below showing the end of all the artist's work.

Mary madness has permeated the air. In the lead up to the festival I'd been fortunate to participate in theater workshops, meaning that most weekends for the past two months were dedicated learning as much as we could in a short amount of time about theater craft and preparing for a play which was written by the director using ideas generated by the workshop participants. The plays' end result was pretty funny and featured a few slapstick elements and completely escaped reality - so well suited to the Mary Poppins festival.

We found some time for things other then Mary related last week. There was some exploration with collage materials trying a Matisse style artwork.

I found that Kookaburra needed encouragement to let go of preformed ideas of how his art should be structured. By having fun with tearing his papers randomly and letting his art work unfold was a little bit of challenge but he did well and we had some great discussions about Pompeii during our work together.

There were lines to learn for me for the play on the Sunday but I was also fortunate enough to learn lines for a commercial which was shot on Thursday. A strange and funny experience which I was lucky enough to share with a friend.

Do I look like a receptionist? That was my part so hopefully....

So many opportunities roll our way when I have my eyes open. Whilst waiting to have a dress rehearsal in our art galleries forecourt, my boys and I stumbled upon a basket weaving workshop run by Aboriginal ladies in preparation for NAIDOC week this week. They were open and patient and I really wish we had of had more time before our performance to do more weaving.

Nervously I waited with friends before our first performance in front of a live audience... well, we thought they were alive but apart from a few sniggers the reaction was definitely lifeless. We were a little concerned how this play we'd worked on was going to go over during the festival.

When Sunday arrived our boys were up before dawn I'm sure, dressed and ready to go. Our first sound check was at nine am. When we arrived and saw the set in a carpark I was really impressed by what our stage manager had procured for our backdrop and that there was even seating! Lots of seating!

By the time the workshops had come to a close, as always, I'd managed to involve my family to some degree. This was Kangaroo's first time on stage and all he had to do was cry on cue and follow direction. He did beautifully!

Hubby lent some know how and muscle where he could.

And as for Kookaburra...

there's a black box sitting on top of his satchel in this photo which contained a remote control for the animatronic parrot which during the plays he directed the parrots eyes and beak when it took it's turn to narrate our story.

The play went off well and people laughed in all the right places and I even remembered my lines well enough to enjoy the show. Such a relief! When I try to remember something like this I worry, panic and then my mind goes blank. Just terrible :O!

The rest of the festival was full of colour in the finished art works.

There is a great joy for us, hanging with our family doing something unusual and fun. I admittedly did get a bit stressed out, but the benefits of having everyone involved as opposed to not was worth the fraction or so of tetchiness that came from me.

A very happy Kangaroo after his performance.

One of the highlights of the Mary Poppins festival is the Great Nanny Challenge. Our director borrowed a skirt and dressed as a naughty nanny so he could give it a go. The Nanny Challenge is a race for Nanny's and their baby carriages. They compete against each other over a short course and the first to cross the finish line wins But! there are rules like no running, no elbowing or jostling each other and then they must change the baby too in order to win. Our Naughty Nanny lost and he was hilarious about it too. Jumping up and down on his hat, whilst gnashing his teeth and tossing his baby bundle from the pram (thankfully it was only a teddy bear) not mention the run/walk!

My niece in red had a go too.


This is me and a great lady, we're dressed as Mary Poppins and the Bird Lady.

After the plays were done we still had more to do , so much to see and do. Our favourite is always the Chimney Sweep Challenges but absolutely best of all this year was going to high tea attended by none other Australia's own Mary, the star of the Mary Poppins musical, Verity Hunt-Ballard.

Kookaburra described the occasion afterwards as being incredibly exciting because he had met his first real celebrity!

It's was a very busy and full week but the highlight was meeting Verity and listening to her speak of her life in the theater and her role as Mary in the Mary Poppins musical. She was well spoken and lovely and she claimed to love our town and it's baking too! It was pretty embarrassing when our compere asked our lovely guest if she'd like a doggy bag to take back with her. Sheesh! But honestly it was difficult to resist a spread like this one at the High Tea. As always, we were amongst the last to leave and we were fortunate to run into friends talking with Verity so we got to have a little up close and personal dose of this practically perfect gal.

So this entry was massive and I wonder if perhaps it may have been better as a dot point. Never mind. I'm so glad I got it up and haven't missed this opportunity to share. Can you see why I love our town? The longer we live here I see just how very a special place it is for our family to grow together in. It etches itself deeply in our hearts. and I think of it truly as our home town. We can't wait until next years festival and I know we're all wondering in what capacity we'll be attending, as visitors or volunteers?

As long as I'm with my family, it'll be just ace.

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the Learning Revolution! and other Weighty Issues

I 've neglected my poor little blog of late in favour of having a rather busy life and consequently I have a ridiculous amount of photos I now have to somehow pick through to find what I really want to diary about whilst contending with the continuity of life. So while I was dwelling on my internal struggle (so kidding) this morning, I came across a link for Sir Ken Robinson from TED. He is always informative, thoughtful and challenging and one day I'll get through all my current literature so I can order, guilt free, his book 'Out of Our Minds'.

As for our real life (not online), today we have a very full day planned. Friends from Toowoomba are coming to play for the day, my little nephew will be joining us too and it's also playgroup day. Lots of children and loads of fun and heaps of noise and I better get cracking soon on something baked to share. I'm thinking one cup slice and blueberry muffins will be the ticket.

Just jumping around on subjects here, well I did mention food - I'm now the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I refuse to look at my scales anymore because I weigh more then I did when I was due with my boys. My biggest difficulty in getting healthy is that I just don't care. Being time poor and always in the company of my children is limiting and sometimes I feel resigned and think I damn well should be able to indulge but I have to face it. I'm really uncomfortable so I need to take control. Oh yeah, and there are those incredibly valid health reasons too. How do I fix my attitude? It's terrible. I have a gym membership but honestly the gym is boring. I can't go to the classes because of the timing is all wrong for me. The best time for me to get there is at half past five in the am but truly I actually love my sleep and need it too, otherwise grumpzillar arises about two in the afternoon. Not great for parenting. Oh and my memory, which is dodgy to begin with, add increased tiredness and I'm sure I'm going to begin to forget the names of my own children. What to do? What to do? My old self is telling this current self to just do it. Haul that lazy backside out of bed and don't eat so damn much. I know I kinda want too but it's so much easier to make an excuse.

So there's my current dilemma. I've indulged too much and am now busting out of my jeans. I'm lacking will power and I like cake. I have to do something about it and soon because summer is rolling around before I can blink and forget about bikini's (rofl!!!!) I just want to be comfortable and at this weight, I'm just very not.

Well it's time to get stuck into my Tuesday morning and it's going to be a beautiful day. I'm sure to get some exercise running around after kiddo's today, I just need a lot of self-control when it comes to the afternoon tea spread. Wish me luck!