School Holidays Round Up

RIP my favourite sunglasses.  

Someone who shall not be named stood on them... 'tis, very lucky the culprit is cute... 

.... and loves to shop!  

Caught up with the gardening.  My assistant landscapers were occasionally helpful!

We also explored some of the local parks and beach paths.  

And, the story behind these two walking together ahead of me: after months of sibling fighting and me desperately trying to referee, R instructed me to leave them to it and that they would sort it out themselves.  Best suggestion ever, as they are finally learning to resolve issues without my intervention.  As we walked up this path they both wanted to be the leader... after a bit of discussion they agreed to walk together and hold hands.  Proud Mama moment!

The Captain is currently obsessed with climbing trees.  Every tree we encounter is examined for tree climbing potential.  At home he spends hours drawing up plans for tree houses.    He has now read all the fabulous Magic Tree House books and I suspect that they might have ignited his passion! I am now steering him towards the Emily Rodda books... both Deltora Quest and the Rowan series.  Any other suggestions?  

Lest We Forget

It is Anzac Day today in Australia, a day of remembrance.  Many years ago, in the little country town where I attended boarding school I was called upon to give the Anzac Day Speech.  At the time I was horrified, overwhelmed with nerves and wracked with indecision about what to actually say.  Now, recalling this moment in my life I can't believe I was given such an honour at the age of 17.  The same age, or close enough to so many of the young men who have lost their lives at war.

"In two major wars and in some smaller our young men have marched.  Some did not return, they rest in foreign fields or beneath the seas.  However, many more did return, bearing scars both emotional and physical, legacies of experiences too horrible and shocking for us to comprehend.  We young people today cannot visualise what they went through and how they suffered.  At school and through books we can learn about their experiences, yet to truly understand or more importantly to empathise with them, we need to have been alongside them.  As it cannot be our returned heroes must be satisfied with our remembrance, our compassion and our gratefulness.  In this way we do way little we can to truly honour you."

(An excerpt from my speech that day, 1990)

Lest We Forget.

Seal Rocks

We have just had a fabulous week away up on the mid North Coast of NSW at Seal Rocks.  A gorgeous little spot that reminded me so much of Depot Beach.  Perfect beaches that are totally unspoilt by development, surrounded by national parks.  No cafes, just a tiny little general store and best of all no mobile service.  Woohoo, it was bliss.  The one significant difference from Depot though was that Seal  Rocks has a lighthouse.  The boys having had the fabulous Lighthouse Keeper stories by Ronda & David Armitage read to them from a young age were just besotted with it!

These two are their favourites!

                  I think I could have quite happily lived in the lighthouse keepers cottage on the cliff!

                               I think that they had my husband in mind when they whipped this particular sign up.

          

 This is the house we stayed in for the week.  Yes, we lit the fire every night, despite the fact that we didn't really need to.  There is just something ever so cosy about having stories in front of the fire in the evening after a lovely day at the beach.

                                   


    The locals call this little corner of the beach kiddies corner.  It was divine.   Crystal clear water at a gorgeous temperature, the kids adored it and so did we.  I can't wait for our next visit!

                             

Happy Easter!

                                                                  Happy Easter to all.  xx

One man's trash is another man's treasure!

A cliche, but oh so true in my case!  It is council clean up in my neck of the woods at the moment and I have been very busy street shopping.

The lamp and shade I found at the bottom of our street when I was out for my evening run with the Captain.   The Captain is such a gentlemen that he carried it all the way back up our street for me.  His father's reaction was not so genteel.  Nevertheless, it is here to stay, especially now that I have discovered it is in perfect working order.

This divine split cane shelf was just a few houses up from ours and was filthy but look how beautifully it has cleaned up.  The little wooden boat on the bottom shelf is from the same rubbish pile and is so sweet.  It was handmade by someone, probably many years ago and is just too precious to end up in landfill.

I have been on the eye out for bedside tables for the spare room and I can't quite believe that I managed to find such a fabulous one on the street.  Now I just need to find something interesting for the other side of the bed.

I often have people visit and ask me where I found bits and pieces in the house and invariably the things that I get asked about are the items that I have scavenged from the kerb, inherited or are op shop finds. The greatest pleasure I get from street shopping though is the feeling of rescuing something beautiful or interesting from ending up in landfill.  It is the ultimate in revamping, reusing and recycling!

Things I regret....

Years ago R and I lived in a fabulous art deco apartment in the heart of Tamarama.  It was a fantastic, breezy apartment in the most amazing location, just moments from the spectacular cliff path that meanders along the eastern suburbs beaches.   In the eat-in-kitchen, the owner had painted an entire wall with blackboard paint.  On this wall we would scribble notes to each other, write out the shopping list and so on.  One day a flight attendant friend popped over to visit us with her then boyfriend who was an up and coming artist.  On our blackboard wall he drew the most amazing chalk drawing of our apartment building and the airport, planes flying in and out and so on!  We were flight attendants after all!  His wonderful mural then remained up on the wall until the day we moved out.  A sad day, but the Australia's Next Top Model contestants, who lived in the apartment underneath ours drove us away with their incessant partying!

Fast forward to today, my friend married her up and coming artist boyfriend and he is no longer up and coming, in fact he has been a finalist for both the Archibald and the Wynne Prize a number of times, two very prestigious art awards, and he is well and truly a success.

My regret?  I never even took a photo of his amazing chalk drawing!  But, I can say that for about 6 months I had an original Alexander McKenzie on the wall in my dining room.

Image

Image

My other regret?  That we didn't actually buy one of his paintings way back when we could actually afford to!  His paintings are breathtakingly evocative.  Landscapes that are vast and timeless and hauntingly beautiful.   Just imagine for a moment that you had one hanging on your wall and the feelings that it would inspire in you on a daily basis!

If you are in Sydney,  Alex has an exhibition coming up in May at Martin Browne Fine Art in Paddington.

Little and Big

                 
                                                                      Or Little Richard and Big Richard.

These lovely lions were presented as gifts to the Captain when he was born.  The little one came from my brother and the big one from my sister in law.  Cute as they are the Captain only ever had a passing interest in them.  The little one however adores them and yes, they are both named after Richard the Lionheart.

The reason for this post is partly to document the presence of Big and Little in our lives.  If you ask the little one who he loves, he will invariably name Big and Little first.  He talks to them, carries them around with him, rubs his face into them and if I insist on washing one (or if it is a particularly disastrous) both of them, he has been known to sit in front of the washing machine ensuring that they emerge safely. Lucky for him we have a front loader with a 15 minute cycle and a lovely viewing window.

Big and Little are well travelled, having joined us on all family getaways.  One eventful trip to Melbourne even saw Little left behind on the City Circle Tram.  We managed to console the distraught child with a hastily concocted story that Little had gone off on an adventure and that he would be back shortly.  Consoling the distraught mother was not so successful.  I rang everyone I could think of trying to get the original Little back and then conceding defeat started to concoct ever more fanciful stories for the boys about what Little was up to on his adventures.

A few weeks later, the little one came to me and said, "Mamma it is time for little to come home!"  Oh the guilt!  He had even taken to pointing at every train we passed,  in his mind trams were obviously trains,   and asking if that was the one that Little was on.  Fortunately, this heartbreak came to an end very quickly.  We were on a shopping trip with my parents, when my Dad whispered to me, there is a shop here that has the right size Little's, should I go buy one?  oh yes!!!

My Dad went and bought him while we were having lunch and placed him discreetly in the little one's pram.  The Captain spotted him first, shrieking "little's back" and then loudly announcing, "he looks different." The Captain was no match for Mummy however:

 "Well, clearly Little was desperate for a holiday.  Look how fabulous he looks now that he has had a decent break and he probably squeezed in a few trips to the day spa as well.  Of course, he looks fabulous now!  His hair has even grown back!"

The little one bought it!  Nowadays these two lions are guarded almost as carefully as the two children.  If you look closely in the above photo  you can see that Little even gets to use the infants attachment seatbelt on a plane.  Safety first people!

The reason for this post though is this post, on this lovely blog.  I showed the photos to the little one and said "look this little girl has a Richard too, although she hasn't cut her Richard's hair by the looks of things!"  "No, Mummy, that is me when I was a baby" he kept insisting.  I gently tried to convince him that there was someone else out there with a Richard but he was outraged by the concept of this.  It ended up triggering a tantrum of fairly phenomenal proportions!  Now, a month later he keeps asking about the little girl with the different Richard!