chaos dreams

Which is kind of like “Four Seasons in One Day” but not set to music! (although if you’re anything like me, you’ve now got that song stuck in your head, so it might as well be set to music!) (and it’s Crowded House, for those who are racking their brains trying to remember!)

Ok, so we left off midway through May, just after the Gossamer Dreams stocking.
You may remember it was rather wet at that point in time!

The week after that I was a bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding which was awesome, although a little (ok a lot) wet and muddy.  Despite the floods, everyone got there safely and home again and it made for some seriously cool wedding photos!

Oh, and the family tradition was kept intact, I was sewing Rhiannon’s dress (with the help of a family friend) until the early hours of the morning the night before, and it got finished off on the day! Looked great though! (and who gave my daughter permission to look sooo grown up!!?)

Skip forward to June, we had Mikey’s birthday (wow 10!), followed by school holidays, and the HAIRCUT!

Since then everything seems to have been on fast forward.  Gossamer Dreams stockings have been a little crazy - good, but crazy.

As of July, I’m officially an auntie (bout time, lol!) and my niece is absolutely beautiful! (of course!)

September saw the bi-annual nappy hunt start again with the Cloth Nappy Shop as an extreme site.  For those who are musically challenged, apparantly things will never be the same again! or so I’ve been told by at least one hunter!

September was also time for another birthday, with Lukas turning 7. He had a fantastic party, with cupcakes decorated by the party guests! I’m not sure that a corn chip would be my first choice of cupcake decoration, but then again, I did discover back on New Year’s Eve that sausages with icing are surprisingly yummy, so maybe I shouldn’t knock the corn chip cupcake until I try it!

We then headed north to Hervey Bay for my husband’s highschool reunion, and stayed with family up there for a week, much to the joy of the kids who had a great time! 9 kids in one house is pretty full-on though, I think all the adults were ready for another holiday by the end of the week!

Sadly when we came home, there was still another week of school holidays left to survive…  Ok, so I’m exaggerating slightly, the kids were pretty good on the whole! But with one thing and another, it’s really brought home how hard it can be juggling 4 kids and the shop during the holidays, so there will be some changes happening before the Christmas holidays - stay tuned for more about that later.

So that pretty much takes us up to yesterday, when the kids went back to school (yay!) and supposedly life goes back to ‘normal’! Normal in this instance involves catching up on everything that hasn’t gotten done in the last month or so! Apologies to people who are waiting patiently for nappies - I have my To Do list all typed up officially, and am crossing things off as quickly as I can.

This has ended up much longer than I intended, so I’m going to call it quits for now, and will post again later to tell you all about the exciting new stuff that’s going to be happening!

Each year for as long as I can remember, I’ve gone on holidays to stay at the family beach house at Bilinga on the Gold Coast. It has  been in the family for generations, the land was bought by my great-great-aunts/uncles after the War and has been passed down through the family over the years. The house has changed over time - there are some great photos up on the wall that show what it looked like 80 years ago, and the various family members enjoying their time at the beach. Sadly we’re coming to the end of an era, increasing costs and taxes etc have brought it to the point where the family can’t afford to keep the house any long, so it’s on the market to be sold. Chances are we’ve just had our last summer holiday there, and I’m feeling a bit sad and nostalgic!

It’s a teeny little beachfront ’shack’…

As a child, I remember staying there with my grandmother, great-grandfather and my mum and brothers and sisters. We would stay for a week or 2, and Dad used to come down on the weekends after work. There was no TV, so we played board games, did lots of puzzles, and learnt all sorts of card games. I remember the boredom of being a teenager, stuck with no phone, no friends, no TV, having to go with my nearly 100yr old grandfather when he went for walks to make sure he didn’t fall and hurt himself. At the end of highschool I spent Schoolies week there, stayed there with a bunch of friends when I was at Uni. That was a lot more fun!

In the last 12 years it’s come a full circle and I’ve enjoyed seeing my own children having fun on the beach, doing all the things I used to do.

I’m going to miss the place once it’s been sold!