An Afternoon with Six

Tatum is here visiting at the moment and yesterday I volunteered to have my nieces and nephew for the afternoon, while Tatum got some work done, this brought my child total to 6 for the afternoon... 7, 6, 3, 2, 1 and 4 months, woweee!

It actually all worked well. Delilah loves her cousins (in the photo above, Miss D is feeding Jasmine strawberries...photo taking was interupted to stop her cramming anymore in), and was thrilled that they were over for a visit. I had to break up a couple of fights between Miss D and Bastian (but that comes with their ages and Bastian was happy to trade a hug from me for whatever item he and Lilah may have been tussling over.), but apart from that the afternoon was passed with drawing, bubble blowing and Harry Potter (much to Charlotte's delight, I think she was a little impressed with my willingness to discuss all things Harry... but I suspect I'm just as big a fan as she is lol!). I love my nieces and nephew, and it has been nice to spend a bit of time with them the last few days.

We are coming up to Delilah's second birthday this Saturday... and I am currently mightily unprepared. I have so much to do the next few days, but truth be told I am feeling pretty exhausted at the moment... not much sleep is being had in this house hold. But we will get there in the end, we always do, and I am excited about Delilah's birthday presents!

Lastly, here is a selfie I took this morning... it made me happy before when I was reviewing some photos I taken recently.

G'day Mate.

Just a quick one. While Luke was off running Miss D's bath tonight she and I were still sitting at the kitchen table finishing up dinner when she grabbed my finger and started shaking it saying "How you?". Cottoning on to the fact that she was trying to shake my hand and say "how do you do?" I answered with "G'day Mate!" in my best Aussie okka accent. Delilah started giggling uncontrollably and then decided to copy me. "Gay make! Mummy!". Awesome:)

Mackenzie

Mackenzie has started rolling. Though she does it pretty infrequently it has reminded me just how fast everything is changing.

I love this photo. It was taken on easter Saturday in Pt. Lincoln. Mackenzie is 15.5 weeks and I am 28.5 years. A perfect moment in time.

Easter

We flew to Pt. Lincoln for Easter to spend it with Dad, Lyn and Jess. We had a lovely time, and even got to share a night of it with Lauren before she had to fly back to Adelaide for work. The only thing that would have made it better is if Tatum Woody and the kidlets had been there too.

We spent Monday relaxing, and on Saturday went for a lazy drive to Coffin Bay... a very beautiful place, normally very quiet, but the population had obviously swelled for the Easter weekend. During the drive I was a little blown away seeing all the trees that had been bushfire ravaged during various summers. There was a bad bushfire around Coffin's in 2004 and most of the trees on the drive in still bare the scars. I wish I had taken a photo.

Sunday was great... Delilah's first real experience of the Easter bunny, we had a hunt first thing in the morning, which she was absolutely delighted by, I think the most difficult thing about it was deciding whether to find more eggs, or eat the ones she had discovered.

It was so much fun watching her run about discovering the eggs. I think she managed to devour three before we decided to put the rest away for later.

Later in the morning we headed down to the park by the beach on front street where I got Jessie to take some family shots of us. She did an excellent job, there are so many good ones to choose from, this is one of my favourites.

After Miss D had a bit of a rest we borrowed the car, and along with Jessie and headed for Glen Forrest Farm, which was a great hit with Delilah. She particularly loved running amongst the Kangaroos and feeding the birds in the huge walk in aviary. I ran from the aviary screaming as I had a bird land on my head and I didn't want one doing the same to Mackenzie lol!

After a beautiful lunch at the Marina we headed home on Monday night.... poor Miss D had the most massive vomit on the plane. We had to strip her down because she was so messy, but she'd perked up so much by the time we got off the plane that she ran around the terminal in just a nappy yelling "I a birdie, tweet tweet!". Beautiful, beautiful girl!

A lovely long weekend:)

Update

This is where my girls are at at the moment:

Mackenzie is 15 weeks old today. She smiles constantly, but will only give up a small giggle after a vigorous rendition of Pop Goes the Weasel. She can grab at any object of her desire with only a little concentration (I love watching her face as she thinks about what she has to do to get something). She is trying desperately to roll over, and will any day now (if she can get her arm in the right position!). She sleeps through most nights (though is currently having a bit of a feeding frenzy!). Not much upsets her... so if she cries you know she means business! I was blown away when I measured her the other day and discovered she is 67.5 cm long! This is about 3.5 cms longer than Delilah was at the same age... and Delilah has always been very tall for her age! She also talks constantly and you can easily enage her in a conversation... she uses her whole body to get the words out! Basically the best way to describe her is absolutely delightful!

Delilah will be 2 in two and a half weeks time and has become an amazing little person. She now has full sentences and communicates with Luke and I very easily... she adds to her vocabulary daily! I'd been thinking recently that it was strange that she'd never said "Ilove you", because I say it to her about 100 times a day, however Luke told her to say "mummy I love you" the other day and she turned to me and said "I oo Mummy", and I realised that she'd been telling me she loves me for ages, I had just mistaken it as her saying hi! Since then I've noticed she says it just as much as I do, I especially love it when she says out of the blue "I oo Kenzie!" and today was a real cracker when she was calling out to her friend Isaac "I oo Isaac!"

Delilah is also reaching the terrible twos and we do cop some amazing tantrums! She is a real character and I marvel at her strong little personality all the time. She has names for all of her Wiggles DVDs and she will tell you exactly which one she wants on and if you get it wrong watch out! This morning I was told most sternly "No Strong mummy! Sword!". Most of all she makes me laugh!

Present Wrapping and Babushkas

I absolutely love a well wrapped present, and I can still remember my delight at realising that my sister Lauren felt this way too at my baby shower for Delilah. I opened a gift box to find several carefully and artfully wrapped gifts inside and I squealed, "That's exactly what I would have done!" and we grinned ( in what was probably a very silly and similar manner) at each other.

This weekend was mini-cronie Grace's birthday party, and it was my turn to buy the Kris Kringle syle birthday present of a book. Because we are very limited in what we can buy I like to carefully wrap the present and add a hand made card or gift tag. I was very pleased with the way this one turned out:

For the gift tag I used some old Cosmo Cricket papers and some sparkly Bella chip board letters. I loved the over all effect, and Grace loved the present.

For sometime now Luke and I have been wanting to get a little table and chairs for the girls to sit at for various activities, however table and chair sets for little people can be notoriously expensive. We came up with this set for $15:

Luke found the table by the side of the road with hard rubbish and gave it a coat of white paint. He picked the chairs up at the Brighton car boot sale for $5 total and I found these awesome wall stickers at Cotton On Kids for $10. Can't wait to see Miss D's face when she gets up tomorrow morning and sees them for the first time!

Before I go I just wanted to write about a little gem of Lilah's that occured tonight. She hurt her finger this morning (it got a little squished in a door and there is a small cut on it) but totally forgot about it until she got in the bath tonight when it must have stung a little. Well for the next hour she kept on going on about how her finger was "Sore" and "ouchies" she even held it in front of Mackenzie's face for about 5 minutes telling her about her "ouchie finger". Luke finally told her that he thought she was "bunging it on", to which Miss D replied "Yeah bunging on! Finger sore, bunging on!" She was still mumbling about "bunging on" as she fell asleep tonight. Love it!

My Beach

I was driving home from Lauren's along the esplanade tho other day and had to jump out of the car and snap this:

I loved the way the sky and the ocean were melting into one at the horizon. It was so tranquil, and unfortunately my little nappy bag camera did not do it justice. I have, just now, come back from walking my dogs along the esplanade and it was quite different out there tonight. It's a beautiful balmy Autumn evening, but there is also quite a breeze, so the ocean was not still. I love how everything changes out there, not just from day to day, but from hour to hour, minute to minute even. I feel so lucky to be able to live so close to the beach. I love where I live:)