Bits and pieces

Max loves having Robert and Samuel sleep over - they move the mattresses into the lounge and watch videos till it's so late I can't stay awake anymore and insist they go to sleep. Last time they came Max made an obstacle course for them as well.

Mack came to visit. Here's when we visited him in hospital.

And here he is one month later - smiling and laughing I swear - not a baby smile - he locks on to your eyes and you'd better not look away - and then his whole face smiles and you wouldn't want to look away.

Peet missed him this time and is desperate to visit.

Max is having a matchbox car revival.

Lee, Joan, Thomas, Jesse, Louisa, Max and I went to our first ever protest. (Roger was at work - I think he was secretly relieved that someone would be available to answer our one telephone call if we were arrested!) (And Peet was on Young Mens camp on Fraser Island.)

We caught the ferry into town.

And joined the Free Palestine group - held placards and chanted 'free free Palestine' when we were told to. Lee took photos -but his camera was stolen a couple of weeks later - Roger says it was Mossad and we better watch out. (It was a lot of fun - and although we are all for the Jews returning to the promised land the treatment of the Palestinians is disgraceful and they really have no hope of ever changing it - and we can argue and discuss it endlessly - you'd swear we were Jewish the way we go on.)

Then to round out the night we went to a Korean restaurant. We all chose with a careful eye on the heat symbols - except Max who insisted he could cope.

It was perhaps a little hotter than he expected.

But he made it through the whole bowl of noodles anyway - no way could I have eaten that.

Saturday

After reading about Elder L Tom Perry talking about work and teaching children to work and saying that he would spend Saturday morning working with children and Saturday afternoon playing with them - I realised we sometimes skip the second part. So this Saturday after mowing and so on at home and a working bee at Pine, we took lemon bread for afternoon tea and went to see the APT at GoMA. It's spectacular.

We love the APT because it's cheery art - usually.

Then - because we have afternoon church this year so it doesn't matter so much what time we get to bed - we went to Mt Glorious for a night hike. Just the rain forest circuit - 1.9 km - dense air, lots of frog sounds, a funnel web spider that Roger teased with a stick, a little mouse like marsupial , an so on. Lee and Joan came too - they were out checking the orientation of their house and fortuitously arrived just as we were about to go.

And Jesse, Peet, Louisa and Max slept on the front verandah - I think it's been a week since they slept inside - we could manage with a two bedroom house -one for us an one for the kids clothes.

Max is in the hammock.

Australia Day

Susie had left over fillet steak (from Georgie's farewell dinner) and a hankering for steak on a wire.

In droving days they would take some steak along, stop somewhere along the way near a fence, find some wire, start a little fire and cook the steak on a wire and eat it with white bread. It's hands down the best way to eat steak. When we first moved to Brisbane we were so desperate for steak on a wire that we drove out of town until we found an open paddock and cooked our steak there and assumed the owner would understand.

So we set up a fire with wire.

Hung festive bunting made yesterday by Jesse.

And had a great Australia Day breakfast.

Richard and Anna (friends - in Australia while he studies) came and brought the highlights of the morning.

Clarissa (who dressed for the occasion and who reminds us so much of LilyRhadika)

and Hyrum.

They are to-die-for cute and the kids spent the hour or so after they left talking about them.

We talked, and rested and ate steak, white bread and lamingtons that the kids and I made this morning.

(Roger was asleep after finishing a night shift - he managed to eat some steak - but couldn't make it out bed.)

Eggs

Because Wonka Bonka (Peet's chook) is a bully and was eating Fisher's food and scaring poor Fisher away, we decided that the chooks needed to go back in a chook pen. They had been completely free range - sleeping in the trees at night. So Roger and the kids cleaned up the old chook pen and got it ready for the chooks - and found 2 nests - with 34 eggs between them - all of which were fresh.

School Holiday Also Rans

Compared to Stradbroke. the rest of the holiday was relaxing and quiet - Max spent most of his time playing Jedi's with Ammon.

Jeanne and Mark took the little boys (and Peet) to Lone Pine Sanctuary.

On the same day the girls had a 'Disney day'. Jesse and Louisa spent the day before baking and made jam drops, popcorn balls, melting moments, cupcakes, blueberry ice drinks, meringues and scones. They set up the lounge and invited Amber (Jesse's school friend) and Monica and Simone - and had a lovely day watching Disney animation.

After a combined Fulcher FHE playing Pictionary we went to KMart and discovered that both Pictionary and Pictionary Jnr were on sale so we bought them both and spent many happy hours playing.

2 days

2 days work and $250 later we have managed to put up a small and free shed. Lee handed down his shed from Kedron and Roger and the kids put it up at our place over the long weekend.

Saturday was all about cleaning up and getting the base ready.

Monday was concreting and assembly.

Alec was motorbike riding,

and Jesse was studying so it was mainly Roger and the three little kids - I was helping Lee with Louisa's goat pen. It rained, was windy and cold, but we all soldiered on.

We thought that surely after a whole day of mixing and carting concrete that Peet would be at least a little tired - too tired perhaps to juggle and sing all through dinner - but no.

Alec got home in time to help with the final assembly - which was pretty tricky due to a new cement floor being under the shed - so we couldn't go inside to bolt it down.

It was about at this point - with Roger balancing on the ladder which was balancing on bits of wood and bricks while Alec and I held it to stop it slipping down the muddy bank that Max said 'OK, Mum and Alec let go!' - he was holding the camera and had it pointing at Roger - ready to capture the big fall. When we said no -he assured us that it was ok because he 'had the video on!'

Found in the wood pile that was moved to make room for the shed:

A blind snake

A legless lizard

A cute brown tree frog.

Gowrie

The Pine pot luck dinner that was due to be held at our house last weekend was cancelled due to rain! That's the third time we've cancelled a Pine pot luck at our house due to rain - and we're in the middle of a drought - maybe we should keep trying and break the drought! But it did leave us with a free Saturday - since we didn't have to spend the entire day trying to clean up enough for guests - so we went up to Toowoomba to check out how the Gowrie subdivision - now known as Birdwood Sanctuary Estate - was looking. It was wet up there - though not as much as at home - and Alec brought the motorbike for a bit of blacksoil fun.

It was cold and windy and we could see the rain coming across the valley - gorgeous. Louisa and Max hunted through the sanctuary hoping to spot a quail (the sanctuary is there to protect an endangered quail - the black breasted button nosed quail) and Lee & Roger put in a few posts to make it easier to see boundaries.

Then we climbed into the Ranger - Roger and Alec in the back - for a four wheel driving tour of the Baxters Road subdivision. Also going to be gorgeous.

Lee drove us past the new Ballymoss subdivision and we headed for home stopping of course to buy some cheap fruit and veg on the way.

Bits and Pieces

Jess, Caitlin Woods and I went to a lecture at UQ called "Merrurki and King Teti' - Egyptian Pharaoh from about 2300 bc. So much fun - once again we were hopelessly out of place - I looked like a teenager relative to the rest of the group and they all had a tweedy professor look happening. Too gorgeous.

Driving to school Max announced that he knew how high you'd have to count to get to two minutes.
Kim: How high
Max: 120
Kim: Yep
Max: Do you want to know how I figured it out?
Kim: Yep
Max: well, one minute is sixty seconds, so you have to do two lots of sixty seconds, so you add 60 and 50 and that gives you 110, then you add another 60 and that makes 170 then you take off the first 50 and that makes it 120.
Simple as that!

Peet is now the grade 8 discus throwing champion of Kelvin Grove State College - and is off the districts - he is incredibly excited - I guess he was always destined to be a tuba-playing, discus-throwing boy!

Jesse completed her english assignment on Hamlet - it was an oral presentation and her teacher said it was the best she has ever seen and that she had never seen anyone cover the topic within the assigned time. Jesse figures it's because she talks so fast - the teacher said they'd need 1200 words for a 10 minute presentation and Jesse managed to squeeze in 2200!

Roger is going to have an eye operation in July - to have a tridgeon removed - apparently no big deal but 10 days of lying around follow.

The whole family is in love with blender whole wheat pancakes - just throw the wheat whole into the blender with milk and so on - delicious.

Things I wish I had photos of:

Driving Petie's Audi - Petie was in China for a week at the expense of her glass supplier for the new building so we got the cool car - Audi A4 convertible - and drove it all over Brisbane with the hood down of course. Jesse said that when she was in it with Alec driving people were pointing and looking at them much more than when I was driving - either it makes more sense to have someone my age driving a car like that or Alec is just better looking - or both. My favourite photo moment of all was on Friday night when Roger had Alec in the front and Peet and Max in the back and they were heading in to look at the Ferrari dealership. They pulled up beside us (in the Tarago) at traffic lights and waved out of the open roof - Max's face was too cute.

Max in the Spiderwick Chronicles. Max started off sitting by Roger and ended up on my lap as the movie got scarier. At one point the mother apologises to the boy for not believing him about the goblins - and Max looked up at me, chin quivering, to ask 'would you believe me?'.

The three little kids with Roger at the beach for 3 days. There is some video of this and it looks like they had a wonderful time.

Louisa hugging Alec and crying last night. Alec drove Louisa to Faith in God activities at church last night and ran into the back of another car on the way there. It was at a railway crossing and the car in front of him must have missed the lights starting to flash and hit the brakes hard instead of keeping going - so Alec hit the brakes hard too and with lots of screeching tyres managed to just hit the back of the car. It was a 4WD with a tow bar so not too much damage to the other car - not too much really to mine either - but enough to repair. Louisa had snuck into the front seat (where she is not supposed to be due to the airbags) and thought she was going to die because she was waiting for the airbags to inflate and smother her. Alec dropped her to FiG and came home - he was a bit shaken but ok by the time Louisa got home. She came running in to the house - crying - and asking for Alec so she could hug him for a while.

Jesse walking out of the State Library - it's Jesse's home away from home at the moment since she has a pile of assignments and she always looks beautiful and tired walking out to the car park to be picked up late at night or at the end of the day.

Thursday

When I cleaned my bedside table on Friday morning I found a 'talk slip' left there by Roger when he got home late from Bishopric meeting on Thursday night. On the 20th April I will be speaking in Sacrament meeting for 20 minutes on "How I seek balance in my life' - a topic with a certain irony considering the day I had on Thursday.

We did the normal house keeping stuff , made sushi for lunch, then took Peet to his physio appointment - where he was given new stretches and a massage that nearly sent him to sleep, despite the physio and I talking the whole time about how hard it is to fit everything in, because he is completely exhausted and ready for a holiday. Then dropped him to school late. Louisa and Max are already on school holidays so we met the Jalils and the Parrys at GoMA to see the Andy Warhol exhibit - and added a whole new meaning to pandemonium. The kids loved the silver cloud room, the photo booths and the '15 seconds of fame' video.

Then had lunch by the river and let the kids play which was perhaps a mistake since they all got covered in mud and grass stains and we still had a movie to go. We loaded the cars up and drove to the cinema anyway and watched Horton Hears a Who - I actually napped through part of it but am assured by Max that it was a great movie.

Joan rang to say she was sick and could we take her to town to send money to one of the guides she and Jesse had on the Everest trek (We send him money every quarter for his university fees). In the end she decided to wait for Lee to get her, and we went to school to sign the letter of appointment for the new teacher - Terry, who is Bahai so he should at least have the peace and love part of the job down. Then collected the high school kids from the train station and took them home with a decidedly glum mood penetrating the car. Except for Peet who was giddy with excitement at having got A's for his music theory test and his performance test. Jesse sat in the car with me then for almost an hour crying and assuring me that she was about to fail everything (this in spite of consistently high grades to date and masses of study/research) and that she was a disaster in every way. When she finally could cope again she went inside while I went to get chook food (they ran out on Wednesday), then came home to chat to Roger about feeling totally overwhelmed with the differing emotional/educational/social and spiritual needs of 6 children, realised I had nothing for dinner - that might explain some of those needs - tried to tell the kids that it was 'catch and kill ' for dinner (in other words try a tin of baked beans) but got howled down and bought pizza. Had scriptures and prayer before Roger left for a long night of meetings, chatted to Alec who is desperate to move to the Sunshine Coast. When I said that I would like to move there too Louisa burst into tears and I spent a while assuring her that although I fancy the idea it is not happening. Max then walked in and announced he was moving with Alec to Lee & Joan's unit and Lee and Joan would just have to figure out somewhere else to go - which caused Louisa to cry again. Made Peet cry by asking him to be respectful of Jesse at school - made Jesse cry by asking her to be respectful of Peet and put everyone to bed except for Max who was still up when Roger got home at 11.15 pm. Now does that sound like someone who has any clue how to find balance in life?

Moth

Roger got home from work tonight and told the two little kids that if they hurried to finish dinner he would show them something amazing.

The excitement was barely contained.

Finally the unveiling - it started with Roger saying 'you have to remember this is not alive'.

It turned out to be an enormous and beautiful - though dead - moth - it is going to school tomorrow.