Waaaaaahhhhhhh! I'm getting old

I need glasses. I had my eyes tested today because I was getting splitting headaches with all the reading and computer work I have been doing lately and thought I would err on the side of caution bu having them tested. Well I'm glad I did! I can't see jack shit out of my left eye ROFL. He tested both eyes first - read the chart no worries. Tested the right eye by covering the left eye - again no worries. Then he tested my left eye. I could not read a single letter past the first line!! WTF?? I have PERFECT vision I tell you! I can even tell which planes fly overhead because I can see the red qantas tails on them for heavens sake! But alas no, I do NOT have perfect vision. Well not anymore anyway. So the official diagnosis is Astigmatism with a dose of long sightedness thrown in to boot. The ironic thing is that Mate is severely long sighted as well and wears glasses full time. This I have always blamed on the IL's LOL because apart from The Farmer, they all have crap eyesight but it was probably my fault all along. Blasted dodgy gene pool I came from ;) .

Then I had the fun of picking out my frames and thanks to having PHI, I pay next to nothing for them so I went with these funky ones from the Versace Versus range. They should be ready for me next week.

I guess it looks like Mate and I will be four eyed gits together then.

Oh boy! Some people are so vague.

OK, so being an external student means that 99% of our course is done via the internet. You are expected as an external student to have at least half a clue of how to use the internet, well at least forums, which is how all the discussion and lectures are done. We are explicitly told NOT to post questions if the answer can be found in the unit handbook because with over 500 people enrolled in the course the lecturers simply cannot cope with all the forum traffic. So what do people do? They post their completely inane questions on the forums and then get narky when the lecturers, or someone else equally annoyed, tells them to read the unit handbook. It really is that simple.

Getting my Geek on.

Since Uni has started I've gone a bit mad with the buying of stationery and books. I have always been the kind of girl who loves new books and loves smelling the newness of their pages and textbooks are no different. We only need 2 textbooks for this subject but I couldn't resist it when someone else doing the course suggested that we need a good dictionary and perhaps even a thesaurus. I started salivating at the thought of buying more books so off I went to find the ones recommended as the best. Now I can add to my collection the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (the 5th edition no less! LOL), all 1710 pages of words, big words, small words, words that climb on rocks, even words with chicken pox! (hotdog! Armour Hotdog!- sorry I couldn't resist adding that in) Its big and it's HEAVY! And the other one was the trusted Roget's Thesaurus. Once the companion of every crossword-puzzler and a book I loved to read when I was a kid (I'm not kidding, I loved finding out alternative, and usually bigger, words to use for something). I am a wordy person. I love using big words and these purchases are feeding my addiction. Maybe that's what drew me to University study? They LOVE big words LOL.

Just so you're up to speed...

OK, a quick wrap up of the last few weeks.

Everyone has finally settled back into school and Doodlebug is coping remarkably well. After initially being concerned about her lack of talking during orientation, on her very first day she did nothing BUT talk!!  Her teacher Miss N said she is just a beautiful child and she is doing really well. But boy she comes home knackered LOL.


We had the school swimming carnival on the 12th and Mate participated in his first ever carnival, having not been able to swim a full lap of the pool till this year (it's a 50m pool!) and he only entered the 50m backstroke because he loves that the best and he came third!!!! I was so proud of him.

And Mate was 9 on Saturday!!! I still can't get over the fact that I have a 9 year old child, who is nearly taller than me mind you. It really does seem like yesterday when we brought him home from hospital, looking like a fat little monkey baby with all his black hair and gorgeous eyelashes. I will have to post pics of that too.

But for now it is good evening - time to log off and get some dinner happening

Oh my, I've been quite the slackarse.

I just realised that I haven't blogged since the end of last month! But in my defence I've had a lot of stuff going on. I did promise that I would post a pic of Doodlebug on her first day of school, and I will, but life just got in the way. I have started at Uni FINALLY!! after waiting for weeks just making do with reading the few resources that were released early it finally started For Real last Monday and I have been loving the challenge. I've already done (and passed with flying colours) two quizes which I will write more about later, I have one assignment in the final editing stage, the next one on the go and I have been busy setting up the layout for my Professional Portfolio so it's all action stations here. I guess I will post this and then do an update post to bring everything up to speed.

Running with Scissors (or should I say cutting with scissors?)

This is Monkey Nut's new party trick. You simply cannot leave a pair of scissors laying around or he will find them and before you even know he is doing it, he is cutting stuff up - doesn't matter what it is either - paper, pair of dolls shorts, my dress that I had just altered. Yes you did read right - he took to my dress with my sewing scissors, so they are sharp enough to cut very easily. Luckily I was able to mend the dress because it is a paisley fabric and you can't even see where it was if you don't know that it's been cut but boy was I mad - mad at him, but madder at myself because I left them sitting by the sewing machine for less than a minute while I turned the iron on 5 yards away so I could iron the dress over. But I had no idea that he would get them, let alone cut up my dress because he wasn't even in the room when I got up. And the dolls pants were attacked yesterday, using the kitchen scissors that he accessed by climbing up on the bench and getting them off a shelf. Luckily they can also be mended and it wont matter that you will see where they were mended. So that is why I was up at some ungodly hour making the drink bottle covers so I could do it and not have to constantly look over my shoulder to see where he was.

Now I would never say that I love sewing

But I do admit that lately I have been enjoying it. A lot. I am starting to drool over fabric sites - www.funkyfabrix.com.au and www.ijustlovethatfabric.com.au are my favourites - and buy fabric on spec, even if I'm not quite sure what I am going to make. I brought some oilcloth fat quarters to make the kids some insulated drink bottle covers and it was challenging - I was up till 2am this morning getting them done because I made them entirely from scratch and wasn't really sure how I would approach it. I originally wanted them to have bottoms, but after making Mate's I realised that they would be easier to get on and off if they were just a tube with elastic at both ends to keep them on. So the covers for the girls were made that way and I am really impressed with how they turned out.

The smell of freshly polished leather shoes

Can only mean one thing (OK so it can mean several things but at this time of year it means only one thing alright!) and that is that it is Back To School time.

Mate and Happy started on Thursday - Mate is in year 4 and Happy is in year 2 this year. Both have been placed with awesome teachers (all the teachers at that school are awesome so it wouldn't have mattered who they got I would have been happy) and Mate is stoked because he is Upstairs this year. Being assigned to a class Upstairs is the holy grail of middle primary school. Apparently all the kids want to be up there - I have no idea why because he came home from school that first day and complained that his legs felt sore to which I replied was from going up and down the stairs LOL. But he's happy so I'm happy. His teacher is a first year out newbie and I used to work with her mother way back before I had kids and she wasn't even halfway through high school, so it's kinda weird when they have a teacher that much younger than you but anyway she is a lovely girl and I think he will have a great year with her.


Happy's teacher has been at the school for a while and she is one of those gentle and kind teachers who really engages the kids, kinda like Miss Honey from Roald Dahl's Matilda. So she is in year 2 and that means that they are the Top Dogs of the Infants section at the school. This year she will do intensive swimming lessons at the end of the year and generally seem all grown up.


Doodlebug will start on Monday and we go from wanting to go to school now to not wanting to go at all - usually when she realises that she wont be able to sleep in or watch ABC Kids. But she's fine, she's ready and most importantly I'm ready. Those with older kids will agree that when you have a child who is going to school for the first time, that when they do their orientation that they just don't seem big enough yet to go to school. They can still have some traits from their toddler years that make you want to keep them home with you forever, but when you are literally only days away from their first day, they all of a sudden grow up and out of any last reminder that not so long ago you were still wiping their bum for them. This has happened with Doodlebug the past two weeks or so. She still sees a speech therapist but the way she has progressed these past few weeks makes me think that our next appointment will be our last. So come Monday I will take the obligatory First Day Photo (which I will duly post here), take her to the IL's for MIL's obligatory First Day Photo and then it is off to school to settle her in and then take off again before I want to take her straight back home with me.....

I'm in the mood for sewing

Well what else can you do in this heat? So I decided that now would be as good as any time to make Doodlebug's library bag for school.

Turned out pretty good, even if I do say so myself LOL.

Then I decided to make one for Happy, even though she already has a library bag.

And then because it is my niece's 3rd birthday next week I made her an apron to go with some wooden vegetables I already had gotten for her.

OK, so this was supposed to be turned around the other way, but you will just have to turn your head to the side LOL.

And no, I dont'take orders ;)

I love you Mr & Mr White

So today was Back to school shoe shopping today and surprisingly it was easy. Well perhaps not all that surprising because I went to my 'never fail to get the kids shoes from here' shoeshop - Whites Shoex. They are awesome blokes. They even know me by name now - I have nearly always gotten the kids shoes from there and they have never let me down. Many other shops I have walked out of empty handed, but never at their shop. So in we go, all 4 Winkles and me and I start picking out shoes for Mate and Doodlebug to try on. As always Mr White and Mr White were helpful and we soon got Mate kitted out in boots and joggers and Doodlebug got her first ever pair of school shoes *sniff*. They even put them on the stretching machine if they are that fraction too snug too. Oh and Monkey Nuts got a new pair of sandals and I got myself a gorgeous pair of DF Supersoft ballet flats - which Mr White reduced from $119 to $89 for me, and then when I went to pay he knocked off another $20 from the total price!!! Which is great customer service I reckon. Mind you I did buy 5 pairs of shoes...

Ahhhh and so the Back To School rush begins

Three Winkles will be at school this year, so that could have meant 3 of everything for back to school purchases, but after combing over Mate and Happy's schoolbags I decided that only Doodlebug needed a school bag, but they all need shoes. Crud. I hate having to buy my kids shoes as they have the crappiest feet you have ever seen. I mean that in a good way but OMG poking hot sticks in my eye would be preferable than the onerous task of taking these kids shoe shopping. But I got them some kick-ass drink bottles from www.onyabags.com.au they are those new fangled stainless steel jobs and they look sooooo nice. Expensive as all buggery but it will be worth it if I neve have to buy a plastic drink bottle again. I brought one for all the kids, plus one for me and one for MIL because she uses this plastic soft drink bottle that will end up giving her cancer or something LOL. So tomorrow I start the Back to School shopping madness and hopefully I can get their shoes.

Well Hello 2010!

So here we are at the start of a brand new decade. They seem to come round so much quicker now than they did when we were kids.

Anyhoo, we had a lovely start to the new year and spent the day with close friends of ours and their two children, just kicking back, eating good food, drinking good wine (well not me because I am a nerd and don't drink anymore) and having good conversation. I was a bit duped on NYE though because The Farmer comes home from work and announces he is going on the tractor for a few hours and off he trots with a six pack of beer. So I entertained myself and ate my Double cream brie and spiced pear paste (mmmm thanks Maggie Beer!) and chatted away online for a while. Not exactly a raving party, but it was still good for the soul.