Just need a lion and a witch now

Alex's room has been upgraded!
Mom and Dad brought over his new wardrobe today. As Alex grows so do his clothes so we needed more hanging space.
I spent ages last night and this morning sketching out his room trying to work out how to fit in the wardrobe without having to take out the bookcase. I could have moved everything out of the bookcase into the wardrobe but then the wardrobe would have been full without any extra space.
We worked it out though and everything fit. I'm really pleased with how it looks. The change table may have to move though.
By the end of the year the cot should be gone and hopefully soon after that the change table top too so things wont look as crowded.

I love a sunburnt country

Well I was all set for a good chat session tonight for the Austprem weekly chat. I had dinner finished, Alex was fed, bathed and in bed, and I had a drink and a cadbury creme egg ready. It was the biggest crowd I've ever seen in chat too. Then it crashed. For a while there I was talking to myself and even wondering if I was the butt of some 'lets all keep quiet for 5 mins and see what she does' joke, then the chat window dropped me out. Since then I haven't been able to connect to the web site to get into chat and there's been no emails on the Austprem list so I'm guessing it's not just me. Actually I couldn't connect to the VIC Triumph car club either and I'm pretty sure they use the same server so things aren't going too well down in VIC tonight.
So instead I've made an effort to go through some of my backlog of photos.
Today we went to the beach. The same little bay the we've been to before, nice and safe and quiet for Alex. This time I was prepared for Alex to want to swim and I made the great sacrifice of my dignity by wearing a swimsuit but he wasn't interested. Last time he went straight in, dragging Graham, and he would have probably kept going except Graham didn't want to get his clothes wet. This time I was ready to get wet and Alex wasn't. He had fun playing with a bucket of water and a watering can and he loved climbing up and down the stairs.
It will take me a while to go through all the photos so here's just a few starting at the end of the day. Still not sure I have my monitor calibrated correctly so these colours might be wrong.

It's going to be a while before he can drink from the bubbler.



All that water behind him and he prefers the bucket.


That's all my sunburnt face can handle for now. Funny I always thought it was sunburnt as in 'I love a sunburnt country' but spell check wants to make it sunburned. Doesn't quite sound the same 'I love a sunburned country'. Yep I got sunburnt. I put 15spf before we went and 30+spf when we got there, thick goopy layers and lots on my face. Of course now my face in sunburnt, even where I had my sunglasses on and I had the camera in front of my face half the time. My legs which didn't have any sunscreen on and haven't seen the sun in years didn't get any colour at all though and Alex is fine. He has fairer skin, had the same sunscreen on and even got fully dunked in the water but he is still beautifully white. Weird. So my eyes are burning and I'm not going to look at any more photos tonight.

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!
Here's some roses for anyone who didn't get any today.


I got a lovely bunch of yellow roses (my favourite colour rose) and we just got back from a romantic dinner for three :)
We had Italian (easy to eat with a broken tooth but painful).
Actually it was a lot like being home, I got to sit next to Alex and share my food with him and clean him up. It was really nice to be waited on though and the guy singing was good.
Alex was well behaved through dinner even if he did eat all the best bits of our desserts.
A very relaxing night.
I need to take some photos of my yellow roses when they open a bit and I have some photos still in the camera of Alex from the weekend.
Alex decided to take his sleeping bag, trousers and nappy off this morning before telling me he was awake. Then he took his shorts and nappy off when he was supposed to be having his afternoon nap. He is just going down for the night now but I can't think what to dress him in that will prevent him taking his nappy off. He is getting too clever.
Let's see if I can be clever and get this to work.
Here's a clip from last years Powercruise at Eastern Creek. The sporty silver car, that's mine!



It will be there again in March.

Happy Birthday Alex!

Happy Birthday Alex!
I can't believe he is 2!
Alex got some lovely birthday pressies including some beautiful clothes from England. I'll have to get some photos of him with his new clothes and toys soon.
Last night we had a quick visit to his Grandparents and Grandma gave Alex a toddler sized broom. Today he swept the whole house! It was OK except that the bristles on the broom are very stiff and scratch the floor and he kept turning it over so the back of the broom head would bang along the floor. Still it was OK, it was his birthday so I was very tolerant :) The cat got all excited with Alex running around so she took to galloping up and down the hall, attacking the furniture at the end. That got to me so I shut her up in the laundry for some time out. I found out why she has been sicking up a bit lately, she has been eating the plant in my fish bowl! I thought she was only after the fish but today I noticed the plant isn't really dieing off, it's been eaten off.
Anyway Alex got all hot and red running around so once he worked out he could use his new broom to hit the doors and walls we both needed time out and he ended up in bed for a much needed nap. Left to his own devices he just wont slow down so I try things like story time or food time to give him a break and if that doesn't work it usually means he is over tired so the cot is best place for him and he just goes straight to sleep.
Tonight his Dad came home with a birthday cake! It hadn't occurred to me to make a cake because if we have any sort of party for Alex it wont be until next week. So a shop bought cake was good enough for a few photos to mark the occasion.
I know the family will say there's too many photos again but I don't think there can ever be too many photos of my little Superman!
He wasn't at all sure what to do with the whole cake and kept trying to grab the candle. He poked his finger all the way through to top a few times :)
He wasn't too sure about eating the cake either but usually he'll try anything once.

What a look!




I think he worked out it's a shop cake.

Little yellow car

Dad came over today with the little yellow car. Alex had so much fun in it he was upset when Dad left.

Fun with food

Another sick day of domesticity and rest. Alex has bursts of high energy that quickly turn to screams and temper so he is obviously still not feeling the best. I think Graham is getting better, either that or the medication is working.
We were expecting a visit from Dad today but he sensibly decided to avoid contamination. Maybe we'll get to infect him tomorrow :)
Alex had fun exploring the garden in between naps.

He is very cautious about stepping down anything. He climbed up the back stairs and could get down the last step on his own but balked at the higher steps. The last step has an upright support for the handrail which he used but the higher steps have just a horizontal rail which he didn't like. Will to remember this when we replace the handrail, though he probably wont need a rail by the time we replace it.
He is careful about even the tiniest step downwards, even if it's just an inch. Here's what happened when he got to a change between the concrete where the BBQ used to be.

Tonight Alex had his dinner then got to sit in his highchair with some finger food. I turned my back while on the phone and when I turned back to him he had very carefully arranged his food on the edge of his tray and was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

It was so clever I accused Graham of doing it but Alex showed me how he did it himself.

Of course the chips were too good to play with so it was meat for the tray, chip for the mouth then carrot for the tray.

Alex had his hearing test on Thursday and did really well. They said he achieved more than they required to give him a pass. So that's one more thing out of the way. Not that we were worried about his hearing but I did feel bad that I hadn't had him tested last year when I was supposed to.

Graham is bathing Alex right now and by the sounds of it the cat's in there too (the bathroom, not the bath). I better check on them, it's way past bed time for little boys.
OK correction, the cat was in the bath. She needed a wash anyway.

Chicken soup

A big happy 2nd birthday to Thomas. Thomas is another mighty miracle prem who was born just a week before Alex and just a week further in gestation. They are virtual twins. They have so many similarities except Tom is a champion climber and Alex hasn't discovered everything he can climb on yet.

We're all sick! Well Alex is almost back to normal, just gets a bit hot and tired.
Graham and I are full of cold. Alex caught it from someone on Saturday, first showed symptoms on Monday then Graham and I both started with sore throats on Wednesday, so we must have caught it from Alex.
Last night was a very uncomfortable, sleepless night. I can't breath through my nose and breathing through my mouth hurts my broken tooth. Add to that the cold and flu tablets which I forgot, until too late, give me insomnia, and Graham was snoring all night because he can't breath through his nose. So today was pretty bad. We couldn't go to playgroup and it was the first of the year at a new playgroup. Alex didn't mind though, he is still not quite right so he had a quiet day, was pretty sleepy and got all grumpy when he wanted a nap. This afternoon we went up to the shops for a few things and when we got back he went to bed and slept so long we had to wake him up for dinner. Then he ate, had a drink and went straight back to bed. He has been drinking a lot, he drank from his water bottle pretty much continuously while we shopped.

I recently moved the bookcase in the computer room. I managed to rearrange things to give me a bit more room on the shelves but I had 3 big folders which were taking up a lot of space. They were 'photo albums' from the days when I couldn't afford photo albums. I had photos glued to the back of old school papers and held in ring binders. Very shabby. So I decided to buy a photo album to hold the lot and throw out the old folders. I picked up an album while we were out today and tore all the photos out of the folders tonight and they are now all in the new album. There's no order or theme to them. They were just a collection of photos over the years. I still have a few boxes of photos to add to them but it was funny looking at these photos again. Kinda painful seeing how young and slim I was. I can't believe I always thought I was fat! I wish I could go back 20 years and knock some sense into myself (and suggest plucking my eyebrows). Oh and how about those 80's and 90's fashions! Scary stuff.

Here's some photos for your amusement.
Check out that gorgeous young thing in the middle. That's my Mom! This was 1987 so I was 18 and in my first year of uni. Got to love Moms fluro yellow socks with thongs! Actually they were my socks and that's my shirt she is wearing too. It's a single colour silk screen print I did of my year 12 school photo, or rather a section of the year photo. Even in this photo I can recognise the people in the print, that's my old friend Nik in the middle. I'm not sure why Dad took this photo. None of us are dressed for a photo and none of us seem happy to be posing for a photo so the best I can guess is he was using up a film. I can remember him taking this and I can remember having to wait for him to take it. He always took too long, now the photographer side of me understands.

Then there's this one from 1990. Taken before I went out to a friends 21st birthday party, just a few weeks after mine. It was a good party, I have some great memories from that night. The hair though is nothing but bad memories. I had my hair permed that day. It was supposed to be a light wave, instead I ended up with tiny tight curls. There was nothing I could do to fix it before the party. I bought a hair band on the way home from the hairdressers to try and tame it and that was it. It was a shocker!

This one was labeled 1983? but looking at the hair it could have been 1985 so I was either 14 or 16. Even then I was showing an need to hide behind a camera :)

Here's a couple that wouldn't fit in the album.
This is my 1st grade class photo, 1975. The year after my brother was born. It needs some repair work done and then I'll reprint it. I'm the one on the front row in the white jumper holding the sign. I was in the front row for most of my class photos and for a few years running I was left holding the sign.
It's funny I remember the names of these kids better than the people in my high school photos. Some of these faces didn't change much. A fair number of these kids went through to the same high school and the really funny thing is one of the boys in this photo became a really good friend at high school. We weren't friends in primary school and he left for another school but we ended up in the same high school and in the same little group of friends from yr 8 onwards. He is the little boy on the right hand end of the row, second from the back. He got taller by the end of high school but I still called him Pixie :)

and here's my graduating high school photo, the whole of yr 12, 1986. It would have been our 20 year reunion last year, if we'd had one.
I'm 3rd from the right on the front row. Yes my friends were boys, we were the nerds who played D&D :) That's Pixie 5th from the right on the front row.

OK that's enough reminiscing. All I'm doing is putting off going to bed because I know my cold will get worse when I lie down!