a bit of xmas

a couple of xmas pics.

Presents!

Thanks for my new stroller grandma!

Second cousins, we know how to dress for Christmas.

All the pretty ladies.

Aunty Anna and Oma

Aunty Lou and Dad

Second Cousins Dante and Nova

Oma Time

   

Unc d, Jade and Pete

After a big day out, still some energy left for shenanigans with pa.

Chris and I at the gardens in the Domain.

Who you lookin at?  You lookin at ME!

 

Rub a dub dub three men in a tub and who do you think they beeeeeeeeeee!

   

THis is how they wear hats west side. ow.

 

wait wait wait, this totally does.

ahh we’ve been waiting for 7 months for this moment to occur. A proper bo crawl from Annie-Rose. Here it is. In all it’s wibble wobble glory. Warning this is for die-hard fans only, am aware it will be boring to most but UK grandparents and aunties, you just gotta see this eh? Or is this still a fascination to parents. Oh my god I’ve lost all perspective. This could very well be as annoying as parents who put their kids on the phone. If it is I apologise.

does this count?

crawling or sprawling?

lamby lamby lamby lamb lamb

I don’t think these are the moves Mel thought her innocent lamb puppet would perform when she gifted him to Annie-Rose.

just like dad.

 

Video of Nova, Leo and Annie Rose playing

Please ignore the fact that I sound like a moron.

Picture catch up – Annie Rose at 6 months.

  

  Sunday morning family all in the bed. Excuse big hair, it was fresh from the pillow.

cause she can sit now eh?

 

Reading to Soloman tiger

 

 

Hanging with Jim n Jules for a not so sunny bbq

 

chillin with lamby lamb

 

Up on all fours and making the crawling attempts! Am starting to plug sockets.

 

Hanging in the cage with cousin Nova cause Leo always tries to give her the bash and often succeeds. That boy moves at the speed of light. See how undismayed he is anyway, after this shot he managed to drop the torch on her head. It’s all done in love and Annie Rose is pretty tough. Nova is like her guardian angel and always says to me, ‘I will look after Annie Rose bader’.

eggs and birds

just now I dropped an egg on the floor on my way to the stove. It went kAA-SPLAT in a undeniably satisfying pa-toosh way. I think it would be the best aggression killer, it made me smile, the noise it made and the yellow and clear membrane eggy mess wibble wobbling there. It looked like a very pretty jelly fish washed up on my kitchen floor. I paused to decide the best way to clean it up and just as I reached for the dish cloth I remembered those ads with the handy towel, how super duper absorbent it is and with just one handy towel you can scoop up a broken egg, remember those? Well I have handy towel. Advertising works on me and I bought handy towel on this one wipe premise, what a myth busting moment I thought and spun for the fat roll of paper. I pulled off two sheets, just in case you know? and smooshed it into the eggy mess, swiping back and forth and then scooping it up and into my cupped hand like a professional mum. Well I tell you. Not only did it NOT get all the egg. IT didn’t even get half the egg. 8, yes, 8 handy towels later and the eggy mess was off the floor and my sink was full of egg paper towel. I was dissappointed in handy towel. a little deflated by it’s inadequacies. shame. It threw me into a questioning of advertising, I wonder if I don’t really gotta getta garage, gotta get a gottage, gotta get a skylineeeeee and perhaps Harvey norman doesn’t really GOoooo harvey norman go? What if the warehouse is not really where everyone gets a bargain and a money back guarantee? maybe someone does beat Supa fruit mart? dang advertising companies.

also while I was feeding annie-rose in her high chair this morning, a black bird flew SMACK into the conservatory window. He hit it with a hell of a force. So hard he lost control of his bowels and left skiddies down the window pane. I leapt up from my seat, followed by annie’s wide eyed gaze and peered out the window frantically searching for the bird, I was on full alert to do bird cpr rescue mission extravaganza, but just when I thought it must’ve fallen into the dense bush I saw it hop hop hop and flap unsteadily into the air back the way it had come. What gets me is that the windows of the conserve are hideously grimmey from winter and had the bird been looking it surely would have seen them?!?! I reckon he must’ve been looking back over his shoulder, giving some other blackbird lady the wink and hollar balloosa smack into the window he went. It reminded me of the time me and clare and chris were drinking in the conserve at mums in our teens and Odette rocked up after work and as she came through the kitchen she gave us a big smile and then walked smack into the glass ranch slider. The look of pure shocked surprise on her face had us all in pieces. it was a real, what the fuck? moment. hahahahahaha.

Cousins, aren’t they the best?

Hob Goblin

 

I’m a pork crackling breast fed baby!

At Sue’s 58th Birthday I ate obscene amounts of Pork Crackling on the premise that I was breastfeeding and so therefore my body would melt the fat and turn it into power juice breast milk.

I now have  a post crackling size 14 butt. I noticed this waddling along beside me in the mall today as I passed by shop windows. horror o horrors.

They had a big pig on a spit for the party. On round one I took a scoop of crackling worthy of your standard Sunday night pork roast, except I was the only one eating the pork roast and so had all the crackling.

Round two. I sent Pete up to get the aforementioned crackling, he brought back one whole dinner plate full of crackling and I put my hand up to my mouth in horror and exclaimed, (loud enough for all to hear), that ‘I could never possibly eat all that crackling!’ 20 minutes later, the plate was empty.

Round 3. Pete dropped me home to settle Annie-Rose to bed around 6 and then went back to the party. When he got home I was slumped on the sofa in a post pork crackling daze going through my expressing ritual. He came in with his hands behind his back, eyes full of crackling induced glee and said, ‘I have a surprise for you!’ and promptly withdrew a takeaway lunch box full of left over crackling.

‘Oh man’ I said as he set the box down beside me, ‘I couldn’t eat another piece of crackling’. ‘No worries’, says Pete and scoops it back up, ‘I’ll just put it in the fridge for tomorrow’ He got as far as the living room door before I screeched out in a crackling frenzy, ‘WAIT! perhaps just one more piece before we go to bed eh?’ I looked at him like I’ve just suggested having sex in an elevator. That box barely made it through the evening but what was left was sucked down for breakfast alongside our poachies.

I think I was pork drunk. Who eats that much crackling? Even the extremely obese would feel guilty after such debauchery. To make matters worse, as I’m writing this blog I’ve just finished watching New Zealand’s Next Top Model, the self loathing is at an all time high. Now where did I put my running shoes……

quotable quotes by kiwis

I was watching the morning breakfast news that is now hosted by Corin Dann and Petra Baghurst and is just not the same as being hosted by Pippa Wetzel and the racist, bigoted, sexist Paul Henry, who was outrageous and terrible but you couldn’t take your eyes off him like a car crash because invariably he would say something so outrageous your jaw would literally drop. to. the. floor. But I am not here to get into a debate about Mr Henry.

Corin and Petra do alright, she was a bit annoying at first and they dress her badly and one day she was doing an interview standing up and the camera panned down to her legs they were so skinny and akimbo they didn’t touch all the way to her pelvis and I felt a bit sick but again I digress, she seems to be working hard to make the public like her so lets leave her be eh?

No, the reason for this blog is that I was watching the breakfast show yesterday morning, as I do, with my cup of coffee in one hand and Annie-Rose in the other and they were doing a piece on a Kiwi Surfer girl who’s just won some big title (sorry I was only listening with half an ear) and they started to chuckle because apparently when interviewed and asked how she’d handled the waves she replied in true Kiwi style….

“I smacked that crap outta that one bro!”

Nice one love. Petra then commented that that should go down alongside another famous Kiwi quotable quote, that of Sir Edmund Hillary. After he and Tensing had reached Everest’s summit Hillary said:

"We knocked the bastard off"

Kiwi’s, we tell it like it is eh?

And just while I’m here, I will introduce you all to a long time favourite breakfast team of mine, Carl and Lisa who present the breakfast news and weather in Australia. I used to love waking up to them while we worked on the Gold Coast, it was a highlight of my day. Below is a clip of Carl being his usual endearing self while interviewing the Dalai Lama.

Carl, Dalai Lama clip

Sleep

Sleep is so important. You only realise this when your sleep has been compromised. Lack of sleep makes you irritable. Unable to think clearly. Ugly. Unhealthy. Fat. Unable to speak clearly and concisely. Unable to blog interestingly.

I read somewhere that humans are built for 16 hrs of wakefulness. So that means in a 24 hour day we must have at least 8 hours of sleep.

The combination of baby and jet lag has ruined my sleep.

When I think of heaven now, it has big fluffy warm soft cloud that my body can sink into like memory foam and I can sleep uninterrupted and when I do wake up I can stare into nothingness blinking slowly until my body drifts back off to sleep again. oh. god. heaven.

When I used to go to bed at night as a little kid I used to ask mum to give me 3 things to dream about. There only criteria was that they weren’t allowed to have anything to do with water, water dreams always turned into drowning shark infested nightmares for some reason, despite my love of being in the ocean my subconscious always turned on me during sleep. When I had my 3 things I would pick the most delicious one and turn it over and over in my head until a story began and I would literally walk myself into my dream story. It was wonderful.

Where is this blog going you might ask. Nowhere. I just wanted to talk about sleep because it’s all I can think about.

I will leave you with 3 really really interesting facts about sleep.

-1) It's impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it. (I swear Annie-Rose does this all the time, she does what I call ‘the thousand yard stare’ before going to sleep, just glazed, unflinching stare)

-2)  Anything less than five minutes to fall asleep at night means you're sleep deprived.

- 3) A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year. (that is a month, a whole MONTH of lost sleep!)

- 4) Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting - to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains.

Sleep well dear friends.

back with my oma….

 

Ahhh….here we are, back with my Oma. I just sit here and chill, in my crib, with my peeps.

 

Cor blimey this one can talk. Reminds me of my nanny payne. blah blah blah blah blah. Gee I am comfy though.

….just so so comfy. ooh I might just…yawn…close me peepers for a bit. No one will see cause my Oma’s just so chatty….blah blah blah blah blah blah….