Day 60 - Breakfast with the Birds

Every morning, Henry and I sit down to breakfast and we count the birds. Henry always looks out for them on the telegraph wires and usually it is a bunch of galahs, just as it was this morning. As soon as one flies away, he calls out "bye!" in his little sing song voice with a little wave.

Day 59 - Marking and Other Evils

It's funny how it still feels like the beginning of the year and you can already feel like you are behind. The eternal beast called 'marking' creeps up on you slowly and builds up quickly and heavily. Besides marking books, there are other tasks such as covering 120 workbooks, programming, designing worksheets, finding equipment, printing and photocopying, attending meetings and oh, did I mention programming?

Day 58 - A Room of One's Own?

I was very excited to come home this afternoon and put my car into the garage, using my brand new remote! It has been a long term project getting the garage to this state, where we can fit 2 cars, a very big trailer and a couple of motorbikes and now it is done. Dale had organised for someone to come and fit an automatic contraption to the existing roller door, so that it is complete! Now this winter, I won't have to put up with iced over windows, which is a bonus.

Day 57 - Hello Mr Snail!

After a bit of rain today, the snails all came out of the woodworks. As I have mentioned before, Henry loves all of his animal books and one of them does have a snail photo in it. When this one caught his interest and I couldn't find his book with a snail to show him, we googled a few pics on the iPad. The one he inspected didn't have his antennae out and I wanted to show him what it actually was! I was glad to have the iPad handy with its camera because I somehow managed to get this cute shot, just by chance. With Henry's eyes on him though, the snail did not feel like coming out and getting to know us!

Day 56 - A Day at the Show!

I have only been to the Canberra show once before and somehow I had in my head that it was pretty small (I even had it aligned with the Blacktown Show in my head somehow). Turns out I was wrong, as I found out later, that about 90 000 people had gone over the weekend. Henry loved the baby animal farm. I was looking forward to taking him in there and as all of his favourite books are animal ones I thought he would like it! I have to say that I was impressed by his animal noises! He knows all the animal sounds, even though he has only seen farm animals in pictures and he matched them all up to the real life ones, only stopping with a bit of a pause when we saw the alpacas who got a bit of a baa baa, neigh neigh. No, he wasn't quite sure what they were!

Day 55 - Father Daughter Bonding

As we cooked a later than usual dinner tonight with Mum and Dad visiting, everyone seemed to end up in the kitchen. Yes, we do still have to paint the outside wall of the pantry! Dale and Jenna were bonding in this picture over some Maths. Jenna always likes a bit of a challenge in the area of Maths when she is bored and with 4 available adults to provide some challenging questions, she turned to her Dad for a few explanations. If you know Dale and his Maths skills well, you may think that is kind of ironic... considering that there were 3 other available adults!

Day 54 - The Chair of Nails

Our kids had their second 'incursion' today, which was a visit from Questacon. Any sort of change to routine does tend to send school kids a little loopy, so you can imagine what having an African Drumming session on Tuesday, followed by Questacon visit on Thursday has left them like. Oh, perhaps add in a bit of rain to top that off! With a bit of luck I somehow got out of sitting on the chair of nails, during the show, my excuse being that my dress was made of a filmy kind of fabric. Lucky Kylie had on jeans and so she braved it to the children's delight. Check out the Questacon guy's face in the photo... obviously an amazing feat - well done Kylie!