In transit

Not sure how this is going to come out as I'm posting from my phone. And my Blogger app keeps crashing.

So, we are officially moved out of our house.  We're staying in a great little Air BnB until we leave in a couple of days' time.

At this point, I am already sick of the upheaval and the temporary everything.  I'm ready to be settled in our house, with all our stuff, back into the normal daily routine without the rushing to and fro, the general disruption to every facet of our day.  And of course you can multiply that by about fifty when you add little kids into the mix.  Even though our accommodation is great, I'm tired of not knowing where anything is, where even getting the girls' breakfast is a mission.

The movers arrived at our house on Monday at 7.30am on the dot and boy do they move.  GET IT!!  Move.

Ok, moving on.  Alright I really will stop now.

I had thought we were super organised and ready and had even had a private little fantasy that the movers would come in and say, "Wow, you people are so organised!".  Well, no.  That was not to be.  Turns out we weren't even a little bit as ready as we should have been and consequently things have been packed that we didn't want to be packed, and so things that we wanted to have packed had to be left behind.

Next time (HA!! There will be no next time) I will be way more ready.  Although it did give me lots of opportunities to say I TOLD YOU SOOO to B who had been pooh-poohing my cleaning/sorting/throwing out efforts that began a couple of months ago.  Maybe I wasn't ready.  But B really wasn't ready.

That first day was total chaos and I thanked my lucky stars that my little baby A is still young enough and un-sleep-trained enough that she was willing and able to fall asleep in the pram as I required her to do.  J went off to daycare which was also an absolute blessing.

Speaking of the girls, they are still both coughing like pack a day smokers so I took J off the to doctor to ensure that she'd be ok to fly.  Turns out she needs a course of antibiotics.  GREAT.  Considering that she literally hasn't been sick in six months, the timing here is truly a marvel.  And now I have to take A back to the doctor to see if she too needs the drugs.

So the movers were done with the house by Tuesday lunchtime.  And none of them even sat down in the driveway crying once, which is what I probably would have done at least once if I'd had to pack that house.  It is expensive but it is definitely THE way to move.  And apparently they unpack it all for us at the other end!!  I know.

While all that's been going on, I've been hanging out at the accommodation with the baby which sounds pretty sweet except she can't sit up by herself.  This means she requires to be held constantly, which takes my productivity levels dangerously close to zero, or I have to put her on the floor.  You'd think that's a reasonable thing to do with a baby - I do give her toys to play with after all - but oh sweet baby cheeses the screaming.  And I mean SCREAMING.  Ear ringing, I-swear-I-am-not-murdering-this-baby, piercing screaming.  Because I laid her on a flat surface.  Girlfriend better learn to sit up REAL soon.

See that nice soft grass with the waving palms?  Looks like a nice place to lie doesn't it?  INCORRECT.  Baby A does not care for grass, or for a rug on the grass, or for any of your ridiculous ideas about where babies should spend their time.

Oh look, here's some evidence that I have taken a wee feet-up break for myself.  You're damn right I did.

Biggie Smalls, while extremely furious about not being allowed outside, seems to be coping pretty ok.  He's found a suitable sun-drenched snoozing location and has assumed the position.  He will be taken away tomorrow to board over Easter weekend and then fly to NZ next week.  Poor little mite.  He probably won't be looking quite so relaxed by then.

In other, more alarming, Biggie Smalls news, he did actually get himself outside the other night.  Turns out there is a cat flap on one of the windows and he was able to jump out.  Unfortunately he was unable to get back in.  LUCKILY he is Biggie Smalls and immediately commenced scratching frantically at the cat flap trying to get back inside, which woke us up with a start and we were able to let him back in.  Another cat might have shrugged its shoulders (or, you know what I mean), and disappeared into the night.  Thank goodness that's not who he is.   It would have been several thousand dollars in transportation costs down the drain, for a start.

You're a good boy pusscat.  A very good boy.

So that's where we are at the moment.  Tired, dusty, a bit stressed, with a smattering of stress-excema on our faces and hands (ok that's just me), but also REALLY excited and pumped to get to our destination.

We're so close!!

Just think, next time I write, we will be LIVING IN NEW ZEALAND.

Farewell Perth Garden...

I've put my 50mm lens back on my camera since it's way more compact than my wide angle lens.  And I've been reminded how much I love that 50mm lens.  It takes such nice photos.  I mean, yes, I have to stand about a kilometre back from my subject to fit it in the frame.  But, ugh.  Such good images.

I was therefore inspired to do a last walk around the garden here in Perth before we leave.  It's all looking so good and it feels such a shame to leave it when it's really starting to look complete.  The house will be rented out until we eventually sell and we know, we know, that tenants most likely will not look after it the way we have.  That's fine.  Sigh.

This is a bit of a photo essay just for my own records so I might not even bother to caption these.  I mean the captions would just be: "plants", "other plants", "more plants".

Oop chubby little baby hands, how'd those get in here!

Plants

More plants

J is addicted to peas fresh off the vine which is lovely and all but also means no peas for the rest of us because she's physically incapable of leaving them alone long enough to actually, you know, ripen.

Other plants

And lastly - because I'm all about keeping it real - cleverly cropped out of my garden shots is the ever-growing collection of toys, bikes, wagons, and doll strollers, which have taken over the backyard.

The last of the summer snaps

Well, summer is done.  Yes, ok, it officially ended several weeks ago but our autumn break only arrived last week, so now it's really over.  That's the last truly hot summer we'll have for some time and I can't say I'll miss it.

That being said, I think the New Zealand winter that we'll head straight into might be a bit of a shock to my system.  I'm from the Adelaide Hills originally and winters there can certainly get very cold - with frosts and everything - but it's been a long time since I've lived through one.  I've really been spoiled in Perth where we have about 2.5 months of winter TOPS, and the sun still shines most of those days.

One person who I think will really relish the cooler climate is the poor cat.  Poor black cat living in Perth.

This is pretty much how he spends October to March

The garden has come through this summer amazingly well.  B kept up the watering with gay abandon, knowing that we had to get things properly established before we leave.  It's all responded in kind and even plants we thought were d.o.n.e have marshalled themselves for a comeback.

Exhibit A below being this bromeliad which was a gift ages ago from an old colleague of mine.  It's been various states of miserable until we transplanted it into this spot and behold!  A flower!  A pretty cool looking flower too.

Exhibit B is my fiddle-leaf fig, the hipster's plant of choice circa 2015.  Longterm readers with elephantine memories will recall from my old blog that I found this plant as a very sad specimen squashed amongst the $7 flowers at the local supermarket.  It had about four very dusty leaves.  I watered it and wiped its leaves and it grew and grew!  

But then we had a few days' hot windy weather a couple of months ago and its leaves started to droop and die back.  I cut off the dead and dying foliage and B was insistent that it should be re-potted.  It looked like it was on the way out anyway so I reluctantly agreed to give it a go and see what happened.

And behold!  New leaves!  I never doubted you, B!

Because I am super on-trend at all times (see: fiddle-leaf fig above), I also recently started a succulent pot.  Not entirely sure why as we won't be here to see it to fruition but the pot was sitting there empty so hey.  Taa-daa.

My kids generally keep me indoors during sunset doing fun things like bath time and reading Spot books, so I usually only see the best sunsets on Facebook and Instagram.  Somehow the other day, though, I happened to be outside while this was going on.  This was actually taken looking east.

One day my girls will be able to take care of their own ablutions and think how many sunsets I'll soak in then!

Found a recipe for brioche bread in Gourmet Traveller magazine.  If we're friends on Instagram you will have already seen this.  Six eggs and 300g butter.  It smells like a croissant.  I'm pretty happy with how it came out considering that I have about zero bread-baking experience.  It was slightly underdone but totally delicious.

Baby A turns six months old next week this week today.  She's had a very cranky and dribbly phase recently so might be teething but really who knows.  Luckily she's chubby and delicious or I might have been tempted to put her out for the rubbish collection once or twice.

Less than one month until we're in New Zealand!!

Parrots and a Dragonfly

When I started this blog (all of a week ago), I told myself I would only be using high quality photos that I'd shot on my DSLR.

That's all well and good for posts about things here in Perth, but for now we can only rely on my husband B's family sending us photos of Ten Acres from their phones.  So already I'm realising that if I'm going to write about renovations and so on, as I intend to, I may have to let the odd low res image through.  I'm clutching my pearls at the very thought.

Anyway.  Just getting that off my chest.

Here, though, are some nice shiny DSLR images from the other day when we had an early morning visit from some corellas and, er, green parrots (king parrots maybe? A twitcher* I am not), and, later on, the most amazing huge glittery dragonfly.

We've grown these sunflowers to attract bees to the garden, plus they grow quickly and look very cool.  Having the wildlife come for breakfast has just been an added bonus.

This reminds me of a book we had as kids called Where Is The Green Parrot

The birds sent J into an absolute paroxysm of delight.  She was crouching down in her pyjamas pointing with her stubby little finger: "Bords! Bords!".  Then, in an exaggerated pantomime with her finger to her lips: "Shhh! Woaw."  Think how Lydia from Real Housewives of Melbourne says "wow".  Like that.

J was also very pleased with the dragonfly visitor and it took some restraining to convince her not to touch and just look.  I think she got it in the end: "Non't touch."

*Twitcher means bird-watcher.  Look it up if you don't believe me.  This is the kind of useless knowledge I retain so that I can forget the names of everyone I meet