Meeks and Mitch went to Balmoral Beach yesterday for something a bit different. Mitch loves playing in the dirt but hasn't had much experience with sand yet. At first he wasn't too keen on it.
But eventually he got the hang of it.
In fact he liked it so much he decided to lie on it and roll around on it.
When it was time to go, Mitch had decided the beach was pretty fun and he was a very happy boy. We'll have to try it again soon.
A few bits and pieces happened last week.
Meeks and I were struck down with a very unpleasant gastro bug which had me off work Monday and Tuesday and Meeks feeling crook Tuesday and Wednesday. We were very worried Mitch would get it and have to go through the unpleasantness, but somehow he managed to avoid it. Then Nana came down with last Friday! Very nasty business.
On the weekend we ran a Garage/Moving Sale at Nana and Poppy's house. Nana was still sick and Poppy was overseas so it was just Meeks and I. A bunch of small bits and pieces sold, but most of the furniture didn't get bought, despite the bargain prices. So now they're on sale on our ebay. Hopefully someone will snap up the furniture. Someone has already bought a couch that was for sale.
On Sunday morning we had a big combined service for our church. The 8:30am, 10:30am and 6pm services were all combined in one big service in a hall at Abbotsleigh. It was a really good day and there was lunch on the oval afterwards which was really nice, it helped that the weather was fantastic. Mitch took the opportunity to run around on the oval with his shoes off and do some exploring. By the time we were ready to go home he was exhausted and fell asleep in the car on the 5 minute drive home.
We really have the feeling that Mitch is growing up at the moment. He's starting to say more words and develop his own little personality.
He spent some time playing on the deck this morning.
This is just a beautiful photo. What a gorgeous little boy.
A few more deck photos. It's pretty much finished now. We stained it on the weekend, so there are a few photos with everything off the deck. It looks a lot bigger with nothing on it.
Then with everything back on the deck.
From the opposite angle.
That's enough deck stuff. You're probably all bored of it now!
Today I got a chance to fill the planter box on the deck. Beforehand Mitch had a bit of a play in the box.
As the dirt pile went down the planter box filled up
Then with all the plants in. They're all looking a bit crook after sitting in their pots for a few weeks. They were really dry as well. Hopefully they'll perk up after being replanted and having a big drink.
We have this azalea in the front garden that spends most of the year looking like it has died and we spend most of the year thinking we should pull it out. Then at this time of year it sprouts all these flowers.
So we keep it for another year. Maybe this year we'll prune it so it looks a bit neater at least.
We've been doing some work to clean up and reorganise our back deck. It had become cluttered and was filthy and was just becoming a bit of a mess. It is such a great entertaining area and with summer coming up we will be using it a lot more so we decided it was time to do something about it. Here is the before shot:
We spent a while shuffling through a bunch of ideas and discarded a lot of them because they were either too hard or we couldn't afford them. One of the big things was we needed to clean the deck and stain it because we hadn't done it since we moved in and that isn't a good thing for a deck. So we started cleaning it using wood cleaning stuff. The difference was amazing. We didn't realise how dirty it was until we started cleaning it. Unfortunately it is back breaking work even with the cleaning stuff because the deck is so dirty. Add to that we measured we have 65 sqm of deck so we're doing it in chunks.
We decided we needed some new pots and plants so we bought those and then tossed up between putting a bamboo screen or building a sort of under deck planter box along the back planted with something to screen the lattice, but decided it was a bit too much work. In the end I built a 3m long planter box out of some timber sleepers we had left over from when we removed the pond out the front. Using the old timber was good for the environment (reusing!) and saved us some money. Plus I got to use power tools! Anyway, here is a couple of photos of where we are up to. Click on the links for bigger pictures:
It all looks a bit bare at the moment, but there is still much to do! We're going to put nice timber slats along the front of the planter box and fill it with small lillipillis after the soil arrives (it holds about 500L of soil!). The idea being it will screen the lattice in the back. We still have to stain the deck. It looks quite dark in the picture because of all the rain over the weekend. We also have a shade sail that we will rig up over the spa so that we can swim in the shade in summer. It is one we can put up and take down as we need it. We're also going to get a little wooden bench for the left hand side. Aside from that we're not really sure what else to do, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.
Ganny and Grandad left today for a month long trip to Europe. I was the good son and drove them to the airport. Mitch came along with me to say goodbye. He loves looking at the planes
Then we said goodbye and off they went on another European adventure
Sunday was Father's Day. It gave me a chance to reflect on how lucky we are to have Mitchy and what a blessing he is for us. In the evening we went to my parents house for dinner with Grannie and Grandad, Mike and Mandy and Uncle Rob. Mitch also got to play with Cousin Lilly again.
Here is a cute one of Mitchy by himself:
In other news, three out of four of Mitchy's eye teeth have poked through and the result is he's been a bit of a sooky boy during the last week or so. It's very unusual for him to cry for no reason and there has been a bit of that in the last week. It looks like our little boy has come out the other side though because he was back to his happy-self today.
After some rain last week Mitchy finally got a chance to play outside this week. Firstly on the deck
Then in the park
Sometimes the planets align (or perhaps it was the earth/moon/sun) and you get some photos which are gems. Meeks got these two today
We made Mitchy his first cubby house on Saturday.
I always loved making cubby houses when I was little, especially when it was unpleasant outside. I guess Mitchy is not quite ready for cubbies yet, he looked in but wasn't really too interested!
Oh well, maybe he's a bit older.
A few photos of Mitch feeding himself some beef stew. He's doing it right-handed in these photos and has a reasonable grip on the spoon. Good boy Mitchy!
Mitchy has decided he's had enough of mummy and daddy feeding him and from now one he wants to do it for himself. So the speed at which meals are eaten has slowed down substantially as Mitch learns to scoop food up and put it in his mouth. He's doing it left handed and kind of holding on to the very end of the spoon so he doesn't have the best control, but as long as the food is fairly sticky, most of it makes it into his mouth. I'm sure he'll get better over time, but for now it's a slow and messy process.
Previously I wrote about Mitch's dislike for fruit. Fortunately that has changed in the matter of strawberries. He loves them ... sometimes. Once he starts eating them he'll get through 4 or 5 big fat strawberries and be wanting more, but then other times he'll take one bite and not want anything to do with them. Very odd! Strawberries can be a bit it and miss. Sometimes you have delicious sweet fruit, and other times they are plain or bitter.
He doesn't do so well for other fruits, but hopefully he'll grow to like new fruits over time.
In other news we were in Bunnings over the weekend and Mitch just loved it. He was running up and down the aisles and as he walked down the aisles he'd walk over and touch one thing and then walk over and touch something else. Obviously this would be a concern if he was in the poisons aisle or the power tools section, but he was just in the gardening bit touching pots and things. We walked past the aisle with the bathroom stuff (tile adhesive, grout, etc) and it gave me the shudders a bit after our bathroom renovation experience. It's hard to believe it is almost a year since we started on the bathroom. We wont be doing it again in a hurry. On the positive side it all still works and it looks okay, so that is a positive :)
We had dinner for my Dad's birthday at Mike and Mandy and Lilly's place on Sunday night. Mitch and Lilly enjoyed the chance to play together.
First there was drawing together
Then there was reading a book with Meeks
Then there was reading a book with Uncle Mike before Lilly went to bed.
Dad loves his Morgan. If you don't know what a Morgan is, have a look here. Given his love of his car we thought we'd make an appropriate cake.
Once again, Meeks' genius shone through in icing the cake.
In other news, the flower on the now identified camelia has opened. It's very pretty!
Every garden has one of those bits you don't quite know what to do with. Our garden unfortunately has a few of them. Today we went to the nursery to buy some plants to fix one of those areas. After we'd been to the nursery we came home and Meeks did some gardening and I did some "yard work". For those of you who are unclear, men do "yard work" and women do "gardening".
The end result was this little garden bed
The ones in the front are low growing gardenias and at the back are lillipillis. We want the gardenias to spread out and cover the ground and the lillipillis to grow up a bit and cover the front of the porch.
We also got some of Meeks' new favourite plants called leucadendrons. There are heaps of varieties. We got one which looks like this
Not a bad photo even if I do say so myself!
There is also this random plant in our garden which we have no idea what it is but it has just started to flower. It looks like this
Anyone have any idea what it is?
Update: The consensus is that it is a camelia. It has opened up nicely now, I'll try and get a photo of it tomorrow.
Later on Meeks had a nap and Mitch and I did a bit of playing outside
I finally got around to uploading all our photos of Mitch. I only ever put a few on the blog, but there are heaps more, so I have put them all on our Flickr site. For the link for 100+ photos.
No photos today, but a few bits and pieces of news. Firstly Mitchy has his first eye tooth coming through. This is meant to happen from around 16 months, so he is a tiny bit ahead. He has been a bit of a pain, not wanting to eat his food and dribbling a lot, and as usual his teeth are the problem.
Some of Mitch's favourite things!
He loves playing chasings, but only really runs from the sofa in the lounge room to the arm chair in his room. It is very cute. He loves being outside too, and he can be outside a bit more now that the weather is a bit warmer. In the park next door there is quite a slope which he likes to "run" down. "Run" in the sense that he starts walking, but gradually gets faster until it is obvious he is out of control and is going to stack any moment.
He loves bark and dirt. He will eat dirt quite happily (perhaps he thinks it is chocolate initially, but why take a second mouthful?) and loves to pick up bark and move it to another place and drop it there. He'd quite happily do it all day if you let him!
He loves trucks and trains. He will stop and watch them when they go past the park or our house (trains don't go past our house fortunately, but when he is near a train line he watches them). He has two picture books with trucks in them which he "reads" (that is he brings them to us to read) over and over. After we have read them to him, he will go through the book by himself pointing and saying things.
His talking is coming along too. Some things he says the actual word for (e.g. duck, bath, ball, car, etc) but other things he will say the noise the animal makes. For instance "oof, oof" for dog, "grrrr" or "roar" for lions, tigers and even kittens (they are all related after all), and elephant noises for elephant. He also makes fire engine noises.
Anyway, that is enough news for now.
Mitch and I had some fun in the park this morning. This park is on Jersey St in Hornsby and it is across the road from the train lines. Every time a train came past Mitch would pause to stop and watch the train.
How cute is this one? He does this little hands behind the back thing sometimes ...
Next was on to the slippery dip. Despite what the pictures show, I did actually help Mitch down the slide, but he climbed the steps and got himself into position.
There is this spin around thing too which he enjoys but you have to keep an eye on him because he likes to let go while he's spinning around.
We got tickets to see The Police at Telstra Stadium, should be a good concert - not as good as U2, but the Police are still good. We just got cheap tickets this time, nothing fancy. As usual there is a long wait until the concert - it's not until 24th January!
I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home on Wednesdays ...well Wednesday nights anyway. A lot of the stuff I do involves spreadsheets and program code with lots of little text. The screen on my work laptop is good, but it was giving me very sore eyes and a headache after a few hours. So I decided it was time to get a new screen. After an extensive search of options and reading of reviews and balancing of the bank account we got a Samsung 206BW. 
It's a 20inch widescreen LCD monitor. I was tempted to go bigger and get the 22 inch screen, but it was about $90 more expensive and you have to stop somewhere.
I bought the monitor from Aus PC Market. I've bought a few components from there over the years and I can highly recommend them. They are a little bit more pricey than some places, but most prices include postage (postage can add $40 to $60 for a LCD monitor), so they end up being good value. They communicate well sending out email when the order is received and assembled and also when the courier picks up the package and generally it gets delivered by courier the day after you order it as long as it is in stock.
This is not an ad for Samsung or Aus PC Market, but I figure when I get a good product or good service I might as well tell people about it!
I'm looking forward to being able to have very relaxed eyes.
