We had Mitch's 5th Birthday party today. It poured with rain all morning and for most of the party so unfortunately there was no opportunity to enjoy the trampoline and swings in the backyard. Fortunately we had arranged other entertainment!
Many thanks to Brett from ReptilesUpClose who brought the reptiles and entertained the kids. They all had such a wonderful time and I'm sure will remember it for many years to come.
How could I forget the cake?! There was a huge scrum of kids around the cake when Mitch blew out the candles. Fortunately I had taken a few beforehand.
I found myself with an unexpected day at home with the boys today while Meeks went off to work for a day. I say unexpected because we had forgotten all about it. So the boys and I played in the garden with the new toys and I took some photos and video and then after lunch and sleeps took some more photos of the boys around the house.
Firstly, before lunch on the trampoline
And a video!
Then around the house after lunch and sleeps. Sam and Lucas eating chocolate eggs
Lucas drawing and smiling
One of the reasons we wanted to get a big backyard in our new place was so that we could give the boys somewhere to burn off the energy they have in abundance. A perfect way to do that is with a trampoline. So with the boys birthday coming up at the end of April, we had their birthday present delivered and constructed (a wise investment given the difficulty in putting these things together) a little early.
This all happened while the little boys were out with Meeks and Mitch was at Pre-school. When they came home, it was a huge surprise! It is something we can all enjoy too.
Mitch shows off his acrobatics
The three boys playing together
Mitch decided to play photographer for these ones (you can see his toes!)
We hope to have many hours of fun on the new trampoline and no doubt a few injuries as well!
It's only taken 1 year, 11 months and 3 days, but last night Lucas and Sam both slept through the night without waking up. Up until last night either one or both of them (when one wakes up he normally wakes the other, but not all the time) would wake up one or more times during the night. Mitch was doing it at 11 weeks, but lets not go there. We hope it will become a regular thing, but I guess we'll have to wait an see.
Anyway, it is a significant milestone and we hope it becomes a habit!
Over the weekend we moved into our "new home". It is a great relief that we will finally be a bit more settled after moving 3 times in the last 9 months. We hope to be there for a long time.
There is still a fair bit of unpacking to do and we still have to move a few things from our old temporary place, but we are already settling in and the boys are getting used to their new rooms. There is also a playroom for the kids which we bought a separate TV/DVD unit for on the weekend so they can watch their shows and not have to sit in the grown-ups lounge room. The house has a huge backyard and a pool which is great except the previous owners had the creepy crawly thing in the pool turn on at 2:30am and everyonce in a while when it climbs up a wall it gets to the surface and makes a hideous slurping sound. The first time it happened it freaked us out. At 2:30 in the morning you don't want huge slurping noises outside your bedroom window!
We have also bought a second car. Unfortunately the new place is not within walking distance from a train station so I drive to the station each morning. We had been borrowing my brother Rob's car while he's been in the UK, but he is coming home for a holiday soon and a friend was selling her car for a good price, so the timing was good. So now we have a white 2000 Subaru Impreza RX AWD to add to the Territory. It is not an expensive or fancy car, but it's fun to drive and can take three car seats at a pinch. Given I only drive it about 10km a day, it doesn't need to be fancy or new!
A bunch of people already know, but to make it official, we're having another baby. Just one baby. Not two or three :)
Here's a picture ...
The due date is around the start of October. We were thinking it was the end of September, but this scan suggests the 2nd October as the due date. Given our past experience we're expecting the baby to come mid-September!
The baby is well and Meeks has been reasonably well but has had some bad days with morning sickness.
Mitch is very excited about the prospect of another baby brother or sister. Lucas and Sam like babies a lot, whenever they see one the go up and point to it and say "Baby! Baby!".
We're very pleased and relieved that it is only one!
It was such a lovely Sunday afternoon that we decided to go to the park for a bit of fun. It's been ages since I took any pictures of the boys, so I thought I'd bring the camera along too. Here are a few photos of the afternoon
After playing in the park we visited Nanna and Poppy and played games in the backyard including hide and seek.
Mitch and Sam managed to put Poppy's back out play "Up High".
Tomorrow is a big day for us. Some of you will know why, others will have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
After literally months of searching, yesterday we signed a leaseon a new place to call home. We've spent the last few months eagerly watching the new rental listings on domain.com.au and realestate.com.au hoping a suitable house would come up. We've visited more than a dozen open houses, been horrified by many, been amazed by a few and confused by others and even got the point of sending in an application or two, all with no luck. We've already moved once into a short term lease rental in Hornsby, that has given us additional time to look, but has never really felt like anything more than temoporary accomodation. We didn't quite end up where we'd hoped to end up, but we've found a nice house for us to live in. It's not very beautiful to look at, but it has 5 bedrooms, a couple of living areas, decent kitchen and bathrooms and a huge backyard with a pool for our growing boys to play in and it is also a decent and reasonable price (which we couldn't say about a lot of other places).
It has been a very uncertain time and Mitch particularly has been quite noticeably unsettled by it all. He's normally such a relaxed, confident boy and that hasn't been the case these last few months. It has been difficult to watch and we can only hope this house and a more settled home will help rebuild his confidence.
We move in around the 26th March and once we're settled we hope life can get back to a more "normal" state.
I've finally had a chance to gather the photos from the cameras (actually I've just remembered, I've got a bunch on my phone I need to get too) and put them into a single set on Flickr, so here is a set to give a view of what our holiday was about. Obviously it does capture every moment, but it certainly captures a lot of them
A bit of a recap of what happen towards the end of our trip.
On the 29th (or was it the 30th, it's all a blur) we took the boys into London again and met up with Uncle Jamie and Aunty Phaik and visited the Natural istory Museum. Mitchy absolutely loved it and rated it the best part of his holiday. Here are some photos of us standing in front of the giant dinosaur skeleton in one of the halls
We had a great time wandering the halls and seeing the amazing exhibits - and it was all free! Mitch walked around with eyes the size of dinner plates. Sam and Lucas had lots of fun to walking around and looking at everything. It was great to see Jamie and Phaik again and we wished at the time we'd been able to spend more time with them, but all too soon it was time to get back on the train and make the journey back on the Surrey.
We spent New Years Eve with Michael and Lorraine and Krissy and Glenn and played cards up until midnight and watched the fireworks in London on the TV. Meeks was feeling sick so she had an early night and was in bed at 10:30pm!
A couple of days later we visited this cool place called The Lookout which was near Krissy and Glenn's place in a place called Bracknell. There is a huge outdoor play area with walking tracks and all sorts of things, but we mainly went for the indoor area (because it was raining) which was sort of like Questacon in Canberra. There were a whole bunch of fun sciency experiments (that may be a strange set of words to place together - yes science can be fun, just ask the guys from Mythbusters!) which were really hands on. Again, Mitch had a lot of fun and the little boys enjoyed playing with everything without really having a clue what was going on! There was a giant piano
And human body experiments
And a giant frog!
Thanks to Michael and Lorraine taking the boys for a night, on the 3rd and 4th Meeks and I managed to get away for a night in a hotel in London. We had dinner with Jamie and Phaik in a cool little Mexican restaurant in/near Bayswater and then went off to a bar where they go frequently. It was great to see them without the kids and to have a chance to have a chat. The next day Meeks and I got a chance to walk and walk and walk around London and visit some of the sites. It was freezing cold, but wasn't raining and was fairly clear and just as we reached Buckingham Palace started to snow a bit. It was a really great time and we loved the chance to have some time just with each other and to see some of London.
A couple of days later and it was time to head home. The less said about the flight home the better. If the trip to London was experiencing the 4th level of hell, the trip home was slightly better, only the 3rd level of hell. When we landed back in Sydney, someone must have been praying for us, because we were through customs and had picked up our baggage in record time and walked out to see the lovely smiling faces of Phil and Shaz who met us at the airport with our car. After the difficulty of the previous 24 hours of travelling, it was such a delight to see the faces of our friends, we are so thankful they got up early in the morning to meet us and it made getting home so much easier and so, so, so much more pleasant.
So that was the end of our holiday. Thanks so much for Michael and Lorraine's generosity and also to Krissy and Glenn (and Hannah) for letting us stay with them.
