The Dragon & The Bear

On Friday, we looked after Dragon while Mummy McT had to go out.


As she didn't know what time she was going out, she dropped Lion off at kindy & came straight on round. Her appointment (which hadn't actually been made at that point), ended up being at 1:30pm so we had the full day with Dragon & most of the day with Mummy McT.



Usually Dragon & Little Bear are good together when I have them, but whenever Mummy McT or Grannysaurus are there as well, they play up.



This time they were darling little angels all day.



We only have one 'baby' and one 'baby's pram' which usually causes fights. Today was no different & they started to have a spat. We convinced Little Bear that Dragon had the baby first & he was looking after her very well & Little Bear should wait for a bit. Little Bear was OK with this, but less than a minute later, Dragon says "Bear. Push. Pram." Dragon had hold of one handle & was offering the other to Little Bear.



I thought this would end in fights fairly quickly, but they actually managed to push it around quite happily for a few minutes with each one holding one handle. Then they both left the pram & baby & went on to other things.

Dragon climbed up on the side of Little Bear's cot. Little Bear immediately copied him & climbed all the way into the cot (she hasn't tried this previously). Dragon was hot on her heels & the next few minutes were taken up with dancing wildly to vegie tales music on a very bouncy innerspring mattress.



This was quickly spoiled by Mummy McT & me when we realised that they were bouncing so wildly they were about to bounce headfirst out of the cot, possibly leaving some teeth embedded in the side rail first.

As it was raining & I didn't feel like leaving the house, we all had a go at Mario Kart on the Wii. Here is Mummy McT hooning round a corner. Little Bear was doing a Maggie Simpson (ever seen The Simpsons credits?), copying the moves & expressions of M.McT, but not actually controlling anything.



All in all, it was a very pleasant day - we didn't do anything exciting, didn't go anywhere, it rained all day & I did a fair bit of housework (ugh) but the kids were so cute & well behaved that it really wasn't a bad day.

Thanks Nanna

I am posting this for the benefit of Nanna in Newcastle.


While Cheetah was on holidays with Nanna, he bought a shirt each for DH, Little Bear & me.


DH got a lovely Bondi shirt. Little Bear's was pink with lots of australian animals.


Here is mine...

















Nanna found it first & pointed it out to Cheetah - as I am a violist, she thought a musically inspired T-shirt might be nice.

I think Nanna is the one who needs new glasses more so than Cheetah.

Thankfully innocent little Cheetah (although he can read music) did not realise what the "music" actually was.

Nanna got a good laugh when we told her about this.

I think my new T-shirt will make a inspirational lovely night shirt.

Schools Back

School's Back !!!!!!!

Hooorrrraaaaayyyy !!!!!!!

No I am not a horrible mother who can't wait to send her child into the arms of another to babysit teach them. However I am a working mother who is grateful to not be spending $60 p/d on top of the $70 p/d I am already forking out to have my daughter in daycare. I don't begrudge what daycare's charge, as I realise that anything we pay is still going to be much less than what we think our little darlings are worth. I just wish it didn't hurt my pocket so much :-)

Cheetah had a lovely first day of school. He is in the same class as a good friend of his (who also has a bit of a calming influence on him) and that makes me very happy. He has 2 teachers this year, one for 3 days, one for 2 days. He is learning japansese through the LOTE program. Hopefully Grannysaurus can remember a bit of her japanese, as I remember diddly squat & Cheetah would love to have someone to discuss his learnings with in an educated manner. I just sit there & go "uh huh".

He will be learning Clarinet through the school program this year. They were told today that they are expected to do 10min practice per day. Cheetah does at least 1/2 hour almost every day & sometimes he can go for an hour or more. I don't force anything, however I STRONGLY encourage at least 20 minutes. This isn't usually any problem at all.

Here are a couple of photo's of Cheetah all dressed up in his new uniforms. He may be grade 5 this year, but you still have to get the photo of everything looking new because once he has worn them once, they will never look the same again. God bless little boys :-)




Little Bear is a little overawed by her brother in uniform. Although Cheetah was the one getting all the attention that morning, Little Bear was only too happy to join in & give him some special attention too. She also loves to copy Cheetah & I think that is why she is looking at him in this photo, so she can make sure she is doing the same thing as him. After these photo's were taken, she insisted on going and getting some shoes on :-)
















Little Bear loves hats & Cheetah let her wear his school hat. It made her feel very important to be dressed up like Cheetah.


Only hitch to the day was that After School Care didn't have Cheetah's booking (although I definitely told them he would be coming). I also hadn't confirmed with Cheetah that After School Care was definitely back on, so this caused a bit of confusion that afternoon. Luckily the carers are very flexible & told Cheetah to come along as it was better to be at after school care even if he wasn't meant to, than to be waiting in the empty school grounds if he was meant to be in care. I picked him up that afternoon from after school care & cleared up the booking issue. This kind of thing would have freaked Cheetah out in Grade 1 (he was up at the office if me or Grannysaurus was even 5 minutes 'late' picking him up). Now he just takes it in his stride & figured I would find him eventually.

Australia Day

OK, I have been offline again for a little bit. Same old story - when I have the time it's because there is nothing particularly exciting going on, so you get posts about me cleaning my junk room. When something interesting is actually happening, I am too busy to blog!

Last Friday night, DH, Little Bear & I went to DH's brothers place for dinner. Little Bear had cousin C all to herself because Cheetah & Cousin T were still in Newcastle visiting Nanna.

It was a beautiful dinner (of course. Aunty M is a good great fantastic cook) and while we were there, they invited us to drive to Cairns with them on the Sunday to visit Sugarworld (waterpark) and stay overnight, returning home on the Monday (Australia Day).

The reason for this trip at such short notice, was that Aunty M left her phone at a place in Cairns after a diving trip. She contacted them & they told her to come & pick it up. She asked them to post it as it was a 4 hour+ drive, they said no - you come pick it up. Aunty M couldn't remember the name of this place, only how to get there, so she couldn't ask someone in Cairns to pick it up for her. Anyway, they decided to go up for the long weekend, spend a day at the waterpark & come back the next day & invited us along for the ride.

Sounded like fun & as we thought it would be nice to do something special with Cheetah before he returned to school (as he had been away from us for 10 days), we agreed to go with them.

It was hectic getting everything ready and we were up until 12:30am the morning before we left. As Sugarworld opens at 10:00am, my Brother In Law wanted to leave here at 6am so we would get there not long after it opened. That meant just 5 hours sleep the night before. We were up so late because I wasn't sure when we would get back on Monday & school resumed on the Tuesday so I had to make sure that we were all ready for the week ahead as well as the trip.

After all that, we got to Sugarworld at 10:30ish and stayed until 2:30ish. It was a fantastic day. We barely saw the kids & Little Bear was happy to ride 3 out of the 4 waterslides. She probably would have ridden on the 4th one too, but we wouldn't take her as it was too hard keeping your own balance on that one, let alone trying to hold onto a kid at the same time. By 2:30 DH said she would have gone to sleep on his shoulder if only the slides were longer.



Just before home time, we stopped for an icecream. Aunty M bought Little Bear a chocolate paddle pop. I tried to get the full mess in the photo, but unfortunately it didn't really show up much. I have therefore cropped the photo, however you can see that besides her face & hands, Little Bear's leg & swimmers are covered in chocolate icecream. As well as this, Aunty M had one whole side of her leg covered, there was some on the seat & a huge puddle of melted icecream underneath them.

It was a fantastically Aussie way to celebrate Australia Day, even if it was a day early because we were going to be travelling home the next day.

(Although an absolutely fantastic time was had by all, it was a waterpark after all & this is why there is a lack of photo's illustrating this post. Camera's & water don't mix. Aunty M did get a couple more, including one of Little Bear & Daddy coming out the bottom of one of the water slides. I will see if I can get a copy to post).

That night we stayed at the Sebel which used to be the Cairns International. The room was a $400 p/n room on the top floor next to the presidential suite which we got for $109 p/n through Wotif & didn't even have to pay extra for the 2 kids.

The view was beautiful, overlooking the casino, however it was a bit too scary for me being up so high & it looked like Little Bear might actually fit through the railing, so we kept the door closed.

Cheetah was absolutely psychotic that night. You would have thought he would be spent, but apparently Sugarworld is so named because of the effect it has on young children. He had eaten well that day, so diet wasn't to blame. He was just absolutely off the rails & got in so much trouble over & over & over again (& still went back for more). Thankfully he got it out of his system that night & the next day he was well behaved on the trip home.

Happy Australia Day

Cleaning out my Junk Room

This blog is mostly for Grannysaurus & might be a little bit boring so apologies if you fall asleep before you finish reading this. On the positive side, for those insomniacs out there, it might make some brain rotting, coma inducing non-stimulating light reading :-)

(BTW - As you can see Mum-me & Mummy McTavish & anyone else who responded to my technically incompetant pleadings to teach me some basics of HTML, I have learned to use strike out. Thanks for the info)

Anyway, over the weekend, the wonderful Grannysaurus was cleaning out her laundry cupboards to give them to me as for 3 years now I have been rolling up my towels & cramming them into the shallow drawers of a tall-boy. This 'new' cupboard is now my linen cupboard.

I think the cupboard is actually older than I am. It is chipboard with a wood-grain melamine finish. & shelves that don't go all the way to the doors but it is a huge improvement on what I was using before.

Grannysaurus finished cleaning them on Sunday & being the loving parent that she is, she sent Mr Sunshine to deliver them to our house in his ute. I then spent all the rest of the afternoon cleaning my junk spare room now that I had all this additional storage space.

Here are the cupboards in-situ. The boxes on top were previously stacked on the floor & I the one I wanted was never the one on top. I also had to move them to get to the bookshelves, filing cabinet, other cupboard, tall-boy, etc. because they were always in the way & never had anywhere to go where they were actually out of the way.

Fitting perfectly between the cupboard & the door is the tall-boy that I used to stuff the towels into. It is also a hand-me-down of sorts. It used to belong to DH's sister until she left home & her parents kept it at their place. When we lived with them for a while, they told us we could keep this when we left. It is old & the drawers tend to stick unless you push on both handles at the same rate. I would regularly skin my knuckles trying to get the towels in & out & it took me a while to find the best way to fit the towels in & I would curse it many a time when I was folding the towels, because the way I had to fold & then roll the towels to fit them in was time consuming & difficult to get right - I often had to fold/roll a towel several times to fit it in.

The whiteboard above is for odd jobs that need doing. The only thing I have been recording on it is my sewing. It is blank at the moment because I got out all my sewing/mending the other day & fixed it all up. I am quite proud of that because sewing I find one of the most difficult tasks to fit into my working mum lifestyle - especially when my sewing table is also the dining room table/general workbench/accumulator of junk & I have to steal a power cable from the pedestal fan (keep in mind it is the middle of summer) and then there are cables stretched across walkways & sewing machines with small curious children running around underfoot are just not a good mix all around.

This is just the other corner of the room. I still have to sort out those shoe boxes. Some are empty & some have receipts & other paperwork in them.

The only reason I took this photo was for the wall. Little Bear's room is on the other side of this wall & there used to be a doorway (with no doors) connecting these two rooms. This design left the smaller room (Little Bear's) virtually useless as it had a window to the floor on one wall, & doorways the two walls beside that. It also didn't really 'open up' the house any, as it just kind of made the spare room & Little Bear's room one big room while both were still separate from the rest of the house (by walls that is, not completely detached).

Anyway, we decided to make the smaller room a bedroom - it was plenty big enough for that & now we have the use of two rooms instead of one.

Little Bear's room has been gyprocked & plastered so it looks nice, but we haven't bothered doing anything to the other side, other than nailing some sheets of fibro taken down from Little Bear's room over the gap on this side. We plan on renovating this room after we do Cheetah's.

The wardrobe in the corner is part of a kid's wardrobe set. There are two of these & a set of drawers that go in the middle. Cheetah has the drawers & other side - at least until we build him a built-in wardrobe.

Here is the floor. I only took this photo because you can actually see the whole floor for once. The blue couch is one that Cheetah got from Aunty McTavish for his first birthday. The black thing is a beanbag with very few beans left in it.

Now seeing as I spent yesterday afternoon doing this, I now have to sort & fold a weeks worth of washing before I go to bed tonight.

Happy dreams everyone ;-)

Cheetah's Photo's

A few days ago, Cheetah left to visit his Nanna in Newcastle. He & Cousin T flew together as unaccompanied minors, both for the first time.

A few days before flying, Cheetah had watched the Aircrash Investigation show & before I turned up at the airport, he had been filling everyone in on how dangerous microbursts can be. (Grannysaurus had taken Cheetah to the airport, as I had to work that morning. I met them there). As microbursts are formed when a storm forms, the fact that the weather was pelting down rain & visibility was not great (at least for those of us without inbuilt radar), I don't think this topic of conversation inspired confidence. In the end I had to ban any further talk of microbursts for now.

Prior to packing his camera for the trip, I uploaded all his photo's taken so far onto my computer. I accidentally forgot to tell Cheetah this. When he spoke to me a couple of days after they got there, I mentioned this fact. "Ooohhhh, THAAAAAAANK YOOOOOUUUU !!!" was the response. I kept talking & about 4 more times in a very short conversation, I continued to be thanked. Cheetah then told me that he had gone to show Nanna or Aunty J his photo's but there were none there & he thought he had accidentally deleted them. I then apologised profusely for the poor little chappy thinking he had deleted all his Christmas photo's but he kept thanking me anyway. I don't think I deserved that but it was sweet.

I told him I would blog some of his better photo's so that he can still show the rellies - so here they are:

Little Bear on Christmas day. This was actually Lion's present, however that didn't stop Little Bear. I have another photo of all the boys playing with her doll & pram in a circle while she looks on from the outside (may have even posted it earlier, but couldn't be bothered checking right now).

















Dragon on Christmas day with his Christmas hat & taking the new baby (doll) for a walk in the new pram. Dragon loved this present of Little Bear's so much, that Grannysaurus has now bought a dolls pram for her place especially for Dragon.

















Cheetah on Christmas night (obviously he didn't take this photo, but it was his camera).

















Wolf & Lion on Christmas night.

















Cheetah took this photo of us at a lookout at Paluma the weekend after Christmas. Cheetah wanted to take one of us, but when we tried to get a second one with him in it, using the timer feature on his camera, Little Bear wouldn't play the game anymore, so unfortunately it didn't happen.















I have to tell you another funny story about Cheetah & flying. The first time we went to take him on a plane after the September 11 attacks, he was about 3ish (he was 2 when the attacks happened - he had flown the Christmas before 9/11 without a problem). For weeks leading up to the flights he had shown more and more apprehension as it grew closer to our departure day. We had tried to find out what was bothering him, without putting ideas into his head (eg. we didn't ask him if he was afraid of the plane crashing because then that would just get added to the list of things he was afraid of). Finally on the day of our flights, I think it was my sister who was talking to him about it. She managed to get out of him that he was scared about something scaring him on the plane by jumping out at him.

At this point, I had to laugh. There was a quit smoking ad on TV where a human dressed up as a cigarette jumped out at a smoker from the cabin baggage compartment. Turns out that all this time, he was scared of a man sized cigarette jumping him on the plane. Once we explained that this was just make believe, he was satisfied & we flew that day without any problem.

Where's the Fashion Police ???

Where's the Fashion Police when you need them?

Little Bear wanted to wear her new singlet (yes it's a boy's singlet but it was Purple & a gift courtesy of M.McT today - Thankyou M.McT, as you can see - she loves it).

She wore it all afternoon until she had her shower.


This afternoon I have been super busy trying to bring some level of organisation back into our home. One job I have not been able to do for quite a while is clean out Little Bear's cupboard. There were a few things hiding in there that she had grown out of & I had run out of room to put all the clothes she now owns.

This is the end result....























I could go for 2 months without washing & Little Bear would still have clean clothes !!!












Here is the pile of clothes that were hanging up, but are now mostly destined to the home of Mummy McTavish on the off chance she may have a girl next.

And just to show you how spoilt lucky this child is, this is her shoe drawer.

It all seems awfully excessive to me who grew up wearing mostly hand-me downs & home made things (back in the good old days when making it yourself actually was the cheaper option).

At least 75% of Little Bear's clothes are hand me downs from older cousins, however there are many really good brands & most of them look almost new. The remaining clothes are either presents or bought by us for a certain need.

I have to restrain myself from buying pretty dresses for her on sale because there really isn't any need as you can see.

Several pairs of shoes are also hand me downs from her 7 year old cousin (& there is one pair in there that actually came from her 12 year old cousin), as well as one of my cousins (who is only 9). The silver pair's I bought at a 2 for 1 sale at pumpkin patch because over Christmas she was wearing dresses in Christmas colours (lots of red) and all her shoes had pink in them, nothing that would go with a Christmas dress. There were more shoes in this drawer, but Little Bear had noticed that I had cleaned it up & taken some out to try. The large pile of socks in the corner is also covering one or two pairs.

It's not really any wonder that this child likes to wear more than one thing at a time.