Anakin

Greg took the first trailer load of stuff to Cairns with him this afternoon. So we don't have a dining table anymore. We've done 2 dump runs today, mainly stuff he's accumulated in his shed plus a few pieces of beaten down furniture. It's going to feel so good at the end of this whole thinning-out process. There's something to be said for shedding excess baggage that's for sure. Greg's parents are leaving in about 10 days so the whole move should be finished soon after.


I'm not phsyced about moving but Greg loves his job at TAFE and has experienced more challenges and job satisfaction in 6 months than he ever would've had at the mill! So that's worth it.

When we settle in we'll get some chooks and start planting sweet potatoes and pumpkin. All Anakin wants is to live on a farm, preferably up on the tablelands near the dam. He wants to milk cows and goats and tend trees. So we'll try and make Cairns as much as an agricultural expreience as we can so the poor boy doesn't get homesick for the country! Last Sunday he spent the entire day out on Rowan's lychee farm with Mum. He picked and packed us half a crate! He packed them into his backpack as well but when he put it on it was so heavy it dragged him backwards, right off the carton he was perched on!

I took Anakin to Amanda's on Friday night after work - I had to help her figure out the instructions on her incubator and change the temperature setting. She'd bought a beautiful little boy kitten that afternoon! She can't help herself with animals and is already looking after so many! She has tiny mouse that she gets up through the night to feed, she's got call ducks and ducklings; muscovy ducklings, chooks, goats, cows, a rabbit, rats, another cat and I'm probably leaving some out! They also love to camp so it becomes a bit of a pain organising to have them looked after. She was worried how Zac would react to more animals and jokingly named him "Crab-bait", saying that's what Zac would want to do with him when he gets home from the mines! We fell in love with him the moment we laid eyes on him and knowing that Anakin has been asking for a pet cat she offered him Crab-bait! So we came home with a kitten!! Anakin has been on cloud nine over it ever since! Me too - he is the sweetest little puddy I've ever seen! So affectionate and playful (and sleepy). In the last two days his name has been Treasure, Diamond, Pounce, Tootsie, Gabooshka, BubbaGanushka and Shaboosh! And he's still not sure which one he's going to go with yet! Andre just calls him "kitty-cat".

We just got home from Carols by Candlelight. Amanda's church runs it each year and there was free cake and cuppa's and a sausage sizzle, Christmas craft and facepainting, popcorn and fairyfloss. As soon as we arrived Andre's main purpose was to act as independently from the rest of his family as he possibly could so I spent the whole time trailing after him. The only time he actually stayed still for a few minutes was when Mum was doing a line dancing demo with the other bootscooting grannies. He was pretty impressed. When she'd finished he went and found her, instucted her to put her hat back on and then took her by the hand, dragged her back out the front and said "Dance!" The kids and I went in search of Christmas lights on the way home. Getting them to sleep in the car was pretty high on my agenda though. Bedtimes without Greg home is pretty hectic and usually full of strife but tonight I managed to carry them both from their carseats to their beds without any rousing. Success!

Made a yummy damper today for the fire we burnt overnight. Big bonfires are something we're all going to miss. Not that it's the weather for standing around tending fires! I'm already a puddle of sweat before 8:30 in the morning!

Had a few games of tennis yesterday with Mum and the PE teacher from school and her son. I was on a winning streak! Except the night before Greg pulled out the massage table and gave me an awesome deep tissue massage (Greg doesn't give any other kind) and every bit of me that wobbles when I run (a lot of bits) hurt like I was bruised all over >.< Worth it though.

Andre

Now that Kindy's over me and the boys are languishing in the fact that we don't need to be anywhere and have stayed home for two entire days in a row. I haven't even started up the car in two days! That's good saves on petrol coz I'm broke! Ha ha.

Anakin and Andre have started each of those mornings by leaving me alone in bed to roll around as I please and have all the pillows to myself (such glory after my usual 6 or 7 hours of broken sleep squashed up between the two of them!) and heading down the orchard for a feed of berries. Except the mozzies are usually having a feed on them! And I rouse them back up to the house after 5 minutes or so.

Our excitement for the day today was a big dig through the sandpit to find half a bucket of marbles. Then they lathered up in soap and hanging on to each end of the skipping rope I dragged them repeatedly down the slip n slide. That was funny.

Oh and an electrician came to install a smoke alarm for us and fix a couple of lights. Yesterday Andre dragged a stool underneath the manhole and wanted me to lift him up there, he reckoned there was a snake in roof he wanted to see. So today when the young lad brought his ladder in and climbed up in the roof space he thought it was great! From then on all he wanted to talk about was the "guy in there". It was his favourite topic of conversation. Me and Anakin humoured him all afternoon with "Yeah, he climbed up in the ceiling hey Bub? Wonder if he saw the snake."

Andre talks so well now. I was getting a bit worried for a while because he showed no real interest in trying to talk much and then all of a sudden he just did. There was no real approximation of speech for him. It seems he just woke up one morning conversational. I'd painted my nails late the other night and when he woke up the next morning and noticed them he said "Awww beautiful! I like it!" But like Anakin when he was little - he won't say his own name. If you ask him what his name is he just says "Me". How damn cute is that but.

Andre has been a bit tough on me. God knows I so wanted this placid, sleep-loving, easy-going boy like Greg apparently was because I thought, mentally and physically that was all I was going to be able to cope with but somehow I ended up with a little hellraiser who's tested me out big time. Up until recently everything to do with him seemed like a complete struggle. Every nappy change was a battle - him kicking and scrambling away, every feed was a mental torture - he has this habit of changing sides every half a minute and won't settle down AT ALL unless he's tweaking away at my other nipple - CHRONIC! And remarkably I'm still breastfeeding him. (And it's still just as horrible!) Bedtimes were often a physical battle. Trips to the shops a nightmare. He never cared if he was in trouble so it was very hard to discipline him. I always (half) joked that it was definitely his first incarnation as a human being because his first instinct was to hit out, stamp his feet and scream his demands at you. He seemed like this little wild animal and we've really had to work at him to be smoochy and come to us for cuddles and kisses coz he just didn't care about affection at all. My other two were much more civilized as babies!! You could just tell Andre hated being a baby! He wanted to do things so bad and just fought his way through each developmental stage and always desperately onto the next. He still now always wants to do everything for himself and is so capable and determined but thankfully much happier that he can do fun stuff like tear around on a bike, climb up to where he wants to be, help in the kitchen, run like the wind... It was basically torture for him being trapped in his little baby body. And it was terrible for me thinking if he could read my mind he wouldn't even feel loved - all my internal monologues where like "keep quiet you little shit!"; "Why did I have to get you??"; "Stop being a freak!!"; "Stop SQUIRMING!!!" Sounds so terrible when I write it like that - I must have thought those things a million times! :( Anyway since he's much happier with his capabilities now and he's all done with teething which was really horrible for him and as long as I don't try stupid things like taking him grocery shopping etc it's all pretty nice. I'm still having to resettle him about 20 times a night; slipping the nipple out of his mouth and sneaking away from him as if he was a bloody newborn so I don't get that much of a break from but once he's off the boob and sleeping through I'll be rejoicing in never having to go through all that ever again!

He was two yesterday! Did I say that? And he's still a bit of a brute but we've managed to soften him up during those two years and he's my little darling as well! I love him to pieces!

Try this.

Eating a huge jacket potato with bacon n onion, garlic butter, cheese, sour cream n coleslaw. It is the BEST. Yum! Left overs actually, from Andre's 2nd birthday celebration on Saturday. We had the slip n slide out for the kids but it rained too much for the bonfire we had planned. The spuds were suppose to go in the coals, we had to improvise. Andre's birthday cake was made from a chocolate cake recipe I've used a few times for birthdays this year "Jimmy's Chocolate Cake" and is definitely worth passing around. From memory it goes:

Bring to boil and then remove from the heat 600mls of cream, 4 and a half tablespoons of cocoa and 1/2 a cup of oil. Add this to 2 and a 1/2 cups of sugar and 2 and a 1/2 cups of s.r flour n beat. Combine 3 beaten eggs a teaspoon anilla essence 1 and a 1/2 teaspoons of bicarb and add to the mix.

There's also a mock cream that goes with it where you boil up a sugar syrup for five minutes - 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar cool it and then slowly beat it into 7 tablespoons of creamed butter.

It's won Mum the Best Chocolate Cake at the banana festival and when you taste it you'll know why. If I've got any room after this potato that's exactly what I'll be eating next.

2011 - a write off.

So I don't think I know how to blog anymore but I'm going to give it a crack. I wish I never stopped. Then there'd be posts (relieving rants) about Andre's personality disorder almost driving me to get a prescription filled (the last time I wrote about him here I was describing him as a content baby that slept alot - what was that about! That must of lasted half a week!) And I'd have written about how amazing it was to be in the eye of a monsterous cyclone - that was wild. Not as scary as being the mother of a 15 year old "run-to" though. Maybe I'll just start with a post about each of my boiz n then I'll just take it from there as though I never left.

Yes it's true,

there are dust bunnies chasing the tumble weeds in here.