Rainbow Dreams

I can't believe it has been a whole month since we were on holiday at Rainbow Beach. We have been going there for the last week in July every year for years now, for the Rainbow Beach Fishing Competition.

The beach? In Winter? Ah yes, gotta love the Queensland climate :)

This year will have to be the last for Cheyenne and I, as she really shouldn't be missing out on a week and a half of school. They don't seem to be really learning all that much in Grade 1 and we did take schoolwork with us, so it wasn't as scandalous as it sounds.

While the "boys" (Steve, his Dad and a couple of mates) fished and won some daily prizes, it was all about the beach holiday for Cheyenne, Steve's Mum and I. Cheyenne really is a little beach bum.

It's a shame we had to come home.

If I won lotto, the first thing I'd do would be to buy a holiday house there.

Hot Chocolate and Marshmallows

... marshmallow socks, that is, LOL.

The chill of Winter is in the air, and that means it's time to drink hot chocolate and break out the bed socks.

All my life I've been cursed with bad circulation, so that means my hands and feet are usually like blocks of ice during the colder months of the year. When I'm lounging around the house, watching TV or headed for bed, I have my marshmallow socks. As you can see, I have a few pairs. OK, more than a few. I'll admit it - I may be obsessed with them. The aqua ones with the non-slip flowers on the sole were bought to match my paisley PJs, and the black, pink and white ones match my Pink Ribbon PJs (and they came in a 2 pack with the hot pink ones). The brown leopardy print ones were just too pretty and snugly to be left on the shelf in the shop.

Actually, that seems to be my downfall. I'm a tactile sock shopper. I don't obviously need another pair, but you can bet I'll see some in a colour I don't have, and once I touch them, I'm done for. Oh, they're so soft, so snugly, and pretty. I'll get them.

I've also recently bought a set of micro polar fleece sheets for our bed. Yes, you heard correctly. Not flannelette. Polar fleece. Sounds a bit odd, but they are to die for snugly, soft and warm, and I'm so glad I got them. Steve, however, is not so impressed. He reckons the pillowcase sticks to the stubble on his face like Velcro during the night. I've yet to see any actual evidence of this though, LOL.

Vege Tableau

I started collecting these shelf-sitter figurines a couple of years ago. They are available in both fruit and vegetable varieties, but I decided to go with vegetables. There are many different ones to choose from - cauliflowers, carrots, corn, peas in pods, chillies, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes... any vegetable you can think of, there is probably a figurine of it in the range.

For ages I just had the broccoli and the eggplant, co-existing happily on my kitchen window sill, above my sink. To me, it always seemed like the broccoli had been telling a joke or having a good gossip and the eggplant was leaning in to share the secret. Last year I bought the orange pumpkin, because, with a grin like that, he looked as if he belonged with the other two gossipers.

For Mothers' Day this year I received another to add to my set. I picked out the butternut pumpkin (...or maybe he's a marrow, I'm not quite sure) purely because of the cranky expression on his face and his folded arms. I knew he would be perfect to play the role of the "outsider", so I've placed him off to one side. I can't quite decide whether he's pissed off because the other three are gossiping and laughing about him, or just because they aren't sharing their secret with him.

What do you think?

100 Not Out !

My Grandma (on my mother's side) turned 100 on the 29th of March, so we had a small family morning tea for her at the nursing home on the Sunday before.

She is quite frail, is bedridden and has almost no vision due to glaucoma and therefore wasn't able to enjoy her own party, but she was awake for most of it.

It wasn't a large turnout, as the family is scattered around the country now, but there were three of her children, eight of her grandchildren and two of her great-grandchildren there to celebrate, and another one of my cousins and his family visited her on her actual birthday the next day.

Here she is on the day, with two of her great-grandchildren, my daughter Cheyenne and my cousin Jodi-May's daughter Gemma.

Happy Birthday Grandma!

Longevity seems to run in my family, as my other Gran (my father's mother) lived to be 101, although she was far more sprightly on her 100th birthday.

Back to School

Well, we've survived the first four weeks of Grade 1 without any dramas. Homework and the learning of sight words has commenced, and home readers are now being brought home for reading practice. PE, Library and Music specialty classes have also started, as has Junior Choir practice. Cheyenne has settled into the routine fairly well, and even with the new earlier starts, we've only been a little bit late once. She loves sitting at her brand new desk and pink swivel chair in her bedroom to do her homework. So far, so good.



She was ready early for school on the first day. We found her classroom, met her new teacher Miss Wilton, and looked for her name on the desks to find out which group she was in. She loved being able to put her stationery things into the tidy tray of her desk, as they hadn't had allocated desks in Prep.

Another cause for excitement on the first day of school was that another wobbly tooth fell out. My little Gummy Bear is definitely keeping the tooth fairy in business! The good news is that just this last week, her missing top front tooth has finally made its appearance! (Typically, only AFTER I'd made her an appointment with my dentist, but isn't that just the way life goes, lol?)

Gummy Bear

♫ ♪ ♫ All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth ♫ ♪ ♫

Well, Christmas has come and gone and we're still waiting for Cheyenne's second front tooth to come through at the top. Her two top front teeth (the ones which were wearing away at an alarming angle) fell out within a couple of weeks of each other, during the last term of school last year. Her left-hand side adult tooth has cut through and grown nicely, but there's still no sign of its mate. To make matters worse, the baby tooth on the other side of the gap has recently fallen out as well, so Cheyenne has a rather gummy (although cute) smile. This of course, has given rise to her new nickname, "Gummy Bear".

She's told me that even though she likes the nickname, I am only allowed to call her that until her new teeth grow in. Fair enough, since she won't be gummy anymore.

Christmas was a fairly quiet, family affair once again. Lunch with my mum and brother, dinner with Steve's parents and two of his three brothers and their families. On Boxing Day we went up to visit some friends who live the other side of Gympie, and stayed the night at their place.

Steve found out about his work closing down between Christmas and New Year a little too late for us to book anything, so we didn't go away anywhere for a holiday. We spent New Year's Eve with some friends and Steve actually managed to see in the New Year for a change, lol.

This past weekend we spent Friday and Saturday nights in the annexe of Steve's parents' caravan down at the Broadwater Tourist Park. Cheyenne spent the entire weekend, playing with some of her cousins, either in the pool or at the beach, and has really gone quite brown. She already had a cute little oval shaped tan mark on her back from her bathing costume after spending so much time in our pool over the holidays.

Now there's only one week to go until the holidays are over and Cheyenne starts Grade 1. Time to buy new school shoes and start going to bed early to practice for next week. The earlier start time is going to be a shock to her system (not to mention mine as well). Guess I'd better start covering schoolbooks and labelling everything so that I'm not doing it all the night before.

Cheyenne has just had her hair cut nice and short so she doesn't start the new year looking scruffy.