There's lots of time for baking....

... when a certain somebody wakes you up at 5am. I made chocolate muffins, fruit loaf and focaccia today - I think I'm the new Nigella Lawson.

Something's telling me that my eyes would be able to focus on the computer screen a whole lot better if I'd had a teensy bit more sleep though.

Wow!

Did anyone else out there watch 4 Corners on the ABC on Monday night? What an incredible story! An amazing documentary "A Walk to Beautiful" about a Fistula hospital in Addas Ababa, Ethiopia screened, and it was an incredibly moving and inspirational piece. It really put into perspective how safe and comfortable and priveleged my fairly run-of-mill life in Australia is, and it just seems so wrong that my family spends more on unnecessary stuff in a year than it costs to completely turn around the life of an Ethiopian woman. Check out the hospitals website... it's great stuff!

Fun with Colin

What excitement!! The Colin Buchanan concert on Wednesday was excellent and the kids had a ball (after JJ stopped screaming and begging to go home because she was so overwhelmed by it all!). Jeremy got the morning off to come, and Lynn came too, so it was a far less stressful experience (for me) than last year. I love the pic of the kids watching the concert - X was too excited to sit on my lap to watch, but too short to see properly when he was standing up, so he spent half the time straining to see over the seat in front!

Instead of being literally last in the queue to see the man himself after the show, like last year (that was a fun hour!) we were actually first in line - woo hoo!


JoJo has a thing about wearing 4 plaits all the time at the moment (actually she has a big thing about the number 4 in general... "Mummy I'm going to smell your hair 4 times"... What the?) and she was very pleased when Colin liked them!

Fun with friends

Posting this a bit belatedly... Our church had a post-Mark-Driscoll-breakfast-for-blokes a week or so ago (they may have called it something different though!) and JoJo, Xander and I had great fun playing with our friends H and A (as well as S, who came after the pics were taken) so their dad(s) could go to the breakfast. Playdough was a big hit with all the kids - the boys found it hard to move past "roly poly, ever so slowly" but the girls made some spectacular creations! It surprisingly civilised having the kids so early in the morning (pre-8am) - they were all fresh and happy. We'll have to do it again soon!

Blue Poo!

Xander must have eaten more of that blue crayon than I realised! Erk!

One of the many problems with.....

.... blogging is that you feel you should have something profound, pithy and preferably witty to say (and of course heaps of amazing pictures). Oh well, sorry.
.... Henry the Octopus is that he is quite disturbingly reminiscent of JaJa Binks. *Shudder* Let us never speak of either of them again.
.... headaches is that they make it very hard to get things done that need to be done.
.... living in an affluent society is that it is hard to focus on the things that really matter.



Here's a photo of my daughter looking very attractive (she has her mother's looks) so this post doesn't look so boring.

Decisions, decisions

Spent an interesting morning this morning. One of our local schools is planning a Montessori program to run alongside its "normal" program and the principal talked to some playgroup friends and me about it this morning. It sounds pretty good on the whole, but I'm a bit worried about there being an "us and them" culture created at the school with the 2 diff programs, and I'm also worried about how the other teachers will feel about the Montessori kids getting such fantastic resources etc. I'm hoping to do some supply work at the school (maybe before the end of the year?) to suss out what's going on behind the scenes. Even though JoJo doesn't start prep until 2010 the primary school we pick will effect what she does next year for kindy. I just have to keep telling myself that kids are resilient and it doesn't reeeeeally matter what we pick. Hmmmm.

We're also trying to make some decisions re: Jeremy's work etc for next year. I can't really go into details here (oooh the suspense) but there are a couple of options and the one which seems more worthwhile also seems more scary and unknown. I was reading my new book (Amy Carmichael) last night and a couple of quotes from her stood out to me.... "to any whom the Hand Divine is beckoning: count the cost, for He tells us to, but take your slate the foot of the Cross and add up the figures there" ....... "Satan is so much more in earnest than we are - he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost". Wow that woman sure had a way of getting to the heart of the matter.