More moving madness.

  

Finally the move has ended.  We even got our bond back.  I never want to do that again!  Never ever ever!

Now we are house-sitting a gorgeous little pair of hundred year old cottages near the river.  They come with cobwebs, 2 cats, 12 chooks, 8 goats, an outdoor toilet and character galore!

Somehow amidst all the chaos we managed to pack the week with all kinds of non-moving stuff as well.

Discovering scotch thistles have beautiful flowers, on our new  block of land (we exchanged!)

Got the costumes for the big end of year ballet show.  Last rehearsal!

Papier mache day with the homeschooling group

The girls picking roses at Nicole's. Thanks Nicole, the sight and smell of these in a vase between our moving mess completely saved my sanity!

Suri spies a rabbit

Bunny like a rose?

My Mum spent hours helping us move, including lots of storytimes.

Suhan finished "The Forest of Silence", and immediately borrowed "The Lake of Tears", and with an almost empty house spent most of his time at home reading to himself.

Pizza dinner and run around with friends.  No more cooking at the old house!

Suyeon was a jellybaby in two performances of the end of year ballet concert, Peter Pan

Posing after the show with Tinkerbell.

                                             

Making sand people (who look remarkably like her drawings of people) 

Waiting and playing while big brother attends Nippers.

Names in sand

Suhan went out behind the breakers on the nippers board for the first time. Here we  are waiting for him to come in after getting dumped a couple of times. It was cold!

Unschool Monday: The Mess of Moving.

Looking back at our week it's hard to see where the days even went, let alone recall the things we did.

We are moving house, so everything feels very disjointed and "lost".  The furniture and possessions are dwindling, the mess is not!

Somehow the kids just keep plugging along as though everything is all right.

We have rediscovered lots of cds and dvds.  They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science has been on high search alert for a while.  We found it!  Nirvana Incesticide made me feel reeeeally old.  I'm just clinging on to my 30s by a thread here!

All the toys have been packed away, and we are on a lego marathon.  We need more lego!!

We have spent a lot of time in the bookshop this week.  New Christmas stock has arrived and it's all VERY appealing.  Suhan discovered a new Lego Creations book, Suyeon a new Pearlie.  Normally we give them the things they really covet from the shop, but I am trying to hold off because it is so close to Christrmas!

Have had some play time in the shop with cafe-next-door-friend.  Lots of drawing and cutting amd making things in the back office.  Fingerpuppets from Made to Play by Joel.

Ballet class

Swimming class

Visit to another homeschooler's farm.

Visit to Grandma Papa and Granny's to move furniture to their shed, eat biscuits, explore the Post Jackson Fig.

Ballet concert rehearsal

Playdate with friends, including a skipping marathon!

Nippers.

Mathletics, Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters.

Playing around with sound effects cd, and setting up stop motion lego scenes.

Deltora Quest and piles of picture books

Backyard science and Canimals on iview.  Maisy and Paddington on DVD.

Lots of bread and pizza making.

Trampolining

Drawing in the corner of the solicitor's office and at the bank.

Moving, moving, moving...



All stickered out, asleep with glue-stick in hand.

ps. Suri has some words!  "Yes" and "bath" are her first words after "Mama" "Dadda" "Papa" and "Maim-ma". ANd Suyeon measured her today: 78cms!

Joining in with Owlet for Unschool Monday

Ms Spooner aged 4

Window plisday

Tair Highs

(how cute, from iddybiddyboo.com.au)

Tabbingdon Pear

September

"Get Reading", an Australian Council for the Arts initiative ran all through September.  We had fun the first weekend with helium!

End of the mini-soccer season

Playground time!

Look at that straight fringe! I don't want to say Suri had her first haircut, she hasn't. She still has all her curls at the back. But Tammy snipped her a bit of vision one afternoon as she sat in her carseat. Still, it made her look like her big sister, her cousin and her aunt, and all grown up.

Look Mama!  It's a...

...giant blue-tongue in the garden!

August

Oh dear no posts since July?? We've been busy!

I think a string of photos is called for, is it possible to squeeze 3 months into one blog post? Maybe one month at a time. The tip of the iceberg, really:

In Canberra to see "The Gruffalo's Child" at Canberra Theatre. This was a great show but I also learned never to give the kids Pringles as we had major aggro behaviour problems and meltdowns later in the afternoon, like nothing else we've had before, so unless it was directly because of the stage show I can only blame the chippies.

The kids perched on barstools watching the footy and studying the guide, after one of our wintery Friday nights' good old meaty fry-up at the golf club with friends. Yep, steaks, chops, calamari, chips, coleslaw, slice of white bread and a fried egg on top. The smell of stale beer soaked into the coasters and the hope for a win in the meat raffle....AHHHH....

Of course every day it's read, read, read. Suri's current favourites are Grug at the Zoo, Mama Mama/Papa Papa, Dinosaur Roar and On My Potty. Suyeon's is Princess Fairy, Sleeping Beauty, Tabby McTat, Princess and the Pea, and also Grug. Suhan's is all the Andy Griffiths books, and Deltora Quest.

I have been having lots of fun (and stress) creating window displays in the shop, so the kids work at their own "window displays" at home. They decorated a dressing table with mirror with all kinds of stuff from around the house. Then they drew a book jacket that matched the display, (to make it look like they had created the display to match the book). I thought it was very impressive! The title of the book was "Shiraz Cabenet South Eastern Australia"

Corrinne Gibbons, ex-local musician from Singapore, at the shop singing from her new picture book Wow.

Then Suhan and his Dad went off to Borneo. They didn't take a proper camera and the little flipcamera got eaten by Deet and so, no photos. But here are the three monkeys eating a monkey platter with Suhan's first really short tropical haircut.

Also in August

Fairies in grandma's garden.

Paper-plate puppets with help from Papa.

Suri's first babyccino.

Working the 150 year old printing press we had in the shop window for bookweek. A great post about this can be found over at Feather and Nest.

A very simple birthday for Suhan. I made him a steiner doll with the same pants as he has, and and made them both (very dodgy) matching t-shirts, which Suhan had designed and I managed to cock-up with my terrible sewing skills. Oh well he was happy.
We had a small family party with his best friend. His grandparents gave him lego so my cake was transformed from an awful failure into a space lego masterpiece.



Happy birthday Little Mister Monkey.

A flying Sydney visit

We whizzed up to Sydney on the weekend for a publisher roadshow of titles due for release for our busiest period the lead-up to Christmas. Nobody was feeling great about a long car drive, my guts were a little fragile and we didn't embark on the trip with the usual excitement. It was just for work not a pleasure trip at all, although when I became immersed in the publisher presentations I did feel my heart soar at all the gorgeous and amazing books we are about to see. But as far as holiday goes it was to be No Socialising, No Shows, No Museums No Celebrity Restaurants, pure work and then chilling with the family.

We did manage to squeeze in a visit to the Powerhouse before the roadshow. They have a new exhibit there which is a hands-on architecture thing for kids.

After the Powerhouse we popped in to Chinatown and got some congee with chinese donut. The donut was just an accidental order because we the parents were feeling so under the weather we couldn't listen or order properly. We wanted the congee, the donut not so much! Only 25 minutes into the congee, when it was almost finished and certainly cold did Suhan say "Where's my noodles?" Oh sorry mate that's not happening we've got this fried donut bizzo instead. What is this thing meant to be? The kids dipped it in their soup. That seemed to do OK.

One more fun thing before the roadshow was a visit to St Peters park for the kids to try out the bike traffic road. Really cool!

So after two days of all-day presentations we were meant to rush straight home and get straight back to work but (and is it OK to be thankful for this?) a stomach bug struck the old husband down. So big kids and I scored an extra afternoon in Sydney while Suri and her dadda stayed in.

Guess what we did? What else but Sydney Trapeze School! More details to follow...

Le weekend

I've just been watching some random reality show design contest with Philip Starck the french designer at the helm, so I felt compelled to give my post title a bit of a french accent. Gosh he is a straightforward man, and I do enjoy the dressing-downs he gives in his lovely accent! "We need to find a pss-eechologeest, zis is complette-ly coucou!"

Anyway, to my weekend.

Big milestone around here, I spent my first full day away from Suri. I was a little nervous about their dad taking all three to soccer in the morning and then dealing with a hungry baby all day, but his brief was give her plenty of water and plenty of snacks, and even though I got the serious milk-tingles a few times throughout the day and checked my phone obsessively, all was fine. I got a phone call at around 4pm as I was rushing, sew-sew-sewing, thinking "they will need me at home it will be chaos", but the call was a happy "We're at Richard's and about to have dinner".

SO as it turns out it was a grand day of soccer, playing with friends, then heading out to the best farm on the coast: six kids and two dads, one mum in China the other half way up a mountain making a doll, and it all went off without a hitch.

Yes me, a doll. Firstly, I am a shithouse sewer. Secondly, (why is "sewer" and "sewer" spelled the same?) it's always felt a bit twee, this doll-making thing. OK I'm going to come out and say it: the patchwork quilt, stuffed doll, dolls in general, cross-stitch and bric-a-brac crafty scene has always been a bit *yawn* to me. BUT there is something about those Steiner dolls with those pinny little blank expressions and the freaky hair and wooly dresses that appeals, and I think it's nice to make something with your own hands for your kids. Something that extends further than my standard pipe-cleaner wands and cardboard box robots, something that they can treasure forever.

So when I saw the doll-making day advertised in the local Steiner school newsletter, my "inner-waldorf" peeked out. When several of my friends did the workshop and came home with lovely wonky dolls all original and gorgeous, I became determined that my children too, would go around clutching beloved dolls all day, even if my son's is clad in home-made syndicated Ben 10 product, disdained by Steiner-types worldwide.

And so it was that I found myself driving child-free with two girlfriends to a little round hobbit house nestled at the foot of the mountains by the side of a river, settling in with a dozen other women for an eight hour day of sewing, chatting and eating, and coming home with dry aching fingers and a featureless yet character-filled doll that is completely ADORED by Suyeon.

Sunday, we took off to grandma's to do some more sewing, pinch some mohair for stuffing (Suhan is sewing Mario stars now. See, you can incorporate tradition craft skills with modern technology!) and to cook up a couple of big lasagnes.
It was lovely to pick my granny up along the way and keep her hostage at mum and dad's. Just plop a sleepy 4 year old on an old lady's lap and old lady can't go anywhere! I got to talk her ear off, and learned I need to be more happy-go-lucky with the houseowrk. HA! Is there anyone less fussy about the house than I? I don't think so!! If I was any more happy-go-lucky someone would call the health department!

Suhan chopped up all the zucchini for our dinner, and we left hot food for all three oldies and brought ours home to poor Dadda who was pretending to suffer in front of the nice warm fire.