A Christening

To celebrate the completion of our pool (after a LONG wait), the decision was made to christen it by jumping into it. Yes it was mid winter. Yes it was freezing. No it wasn't my idea! Glad I was designated photographer.

Psyching themselves up

Oh what a feeling!

Hey someone piked!!

Smart move because it was FREEZING

Ohana

Our home has officially been named. After many months of thought and brain-storming, the name that we've picked felt right immediately. So our Disney castle has been named "Ohana", simply because as explained by Lilo, " 'Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten. "

Our stainless steel letters arrived, and with some help from the builder (they bought the glue, brought the spirit level, and drew the line for Malcolm to stick the letters on to), Malcolm successfully installed the letters next to the front door.

Malcolm's handiwork

Nervously peeling back the tape...

Ta-da! Thanks Peter for your help!

On a completely unrelated note, I felt like baking today. After years of oven neglect, I finally remembered how much I enjoy it! Waiting to be used were over-ripe pears and left over macadamia nuts. The pears were bulked up with frozen blueberries and Donna Hay's rolled oats crumble topping received an additional boost of chopped macadamias. It was quick, easy and it must have tasted alright as there were none left behind!

Pear and blueberry with macadamia nut crumble topping

Guess it was popular

The Home Stretch

It is 1:45am. I have 45 minutes before I have to wake the children up. I don't think there's any point sleeping. So a blogging I will go!

It has been a full day. On top of work, and taking the children to swimming classes, there were meetings with the builders, basins to be selected, electrical plans to check, garage doors to be fixed, paperwork to be completed for the banks, a certain GPS with European maps to be located and a necessary visit to the bank to acquire ourselves some Euros! We made it just in time before the banks closed. Luckily for us, the person at the bank seemed to have taken a liking to Malcolm's Egyptian T-shirt. She waived the $15 fee for our travel card. Bonus.

An even bigger bonus were our parents. Both sets had arrived whilst I was picking up the children from school and were seemingly having a party. However, they made themselves very useful...when we came back from swimming, they had taken in and folded my washing, emptied the swimming bag and hung out the wet stuff, mended Malcolm's most treasured travelling pants, and had dinner prepared on the table. On the menu tonight was Peking duck accompanied by wonton soup. My parents were worried that we might miss good Chinese food while we were away. I wasn't about to complain. Between our parents, they washed up after dinner, cleared out our fridge, cleaned our kitchen and took our excess rubbish away in their car. The list of useful things they did continued...bathing the children, putting them to bed, and my father volunteering to drive us to the airport at 3am! We really would have been in big desperate doo doo if not for both sets parents. We've also received an offer from our dear friend to collect our mail while we are away. God is good!

Peking Duck for dinner

Wonton soup

Unfortunately, there were some things that had to be left undone. Tours and transfers that were meant to be booked didn't happen. We nearly forgot to check in for our flights! For the first time in a long time, we will be winging parts of our trip. There are probably a few other things I have forgotten, but I'm past the point of caring. I am just glad that it is finally time to go.

Au revoir!

Playing "match the lock and key" and "remember the code" past midnight was not  an easy task!

All packed and ready to go. 3 suitcases and 5 carry ons.

Seek And Ye Shall Find

Today, we returned to our ancestral home in preparation for the upcoming demolition. We had to sort out 22 years worth of treasures that was sitting in the garage of the house, and my brother and his family had to move out. Many things have happened after my last post made on the house more than one year ago! State legislation repeals, class actions, council woes, and town planner incompetence just to name a few. Most importantly though, after all that drama, we have D.A approval! So the home that we have grown up in will be demolished before Christmas and hopefully building of the new homes will commence in February next year.

A piece of land around 2000m2 that somehow could not meet council's subdivision requirements...go figure.

The backyard...

...but wait...there's more!

The garage was FILLED right to the door with boxes. My parents had done a good job sorting through half the boxes over the past couple of weeks. Today was the last day we had to go through the rest before my parents leave on yet another overseas trip. It was a nice family day, full of fun, food and reminiscing, especially with discoveries of long forgotten letters and photographs.

A tired mother who can't wait to fly away!

Boxes to be sorted...2 more rooms of it next to the garage!

Hmmm...it appears that some were just moved to the garage next door 

The children had a blast finding "treasures"

Children looking after each other while the adults worked.

My parents kept Ikea catalogues from 1983...

Trival pursuit lah!

The library book that banned Malcolm from Willoughby library...

...due date was 15 Dec 1999!

More treasures...our long lost wedding certificate!

Jonah was determined to get the trolley from  house number 3 to house number 5

Darn! Stairs too hard

I know! Walk down the grass

Until it is even with the driveway

Then walk back up

See Mum! That's how you do it!

Asked the children to decorate the "tree" with decorations we wanted to throw out in a bid to get them out of our hair!

Lara had no problems

But Jonah couldn't reach

So he decorated twigs on the ground instead!

A New Home

It has been rather remiss of me to not have mentioned that we are currently in the process of planning for our new home. We have to finalise the plans and submit it to the local council for approval by December 8. To cut a long story short, my parents have generously offered to give us our inheritance early. So my brother and I will be subdividing the property and building new homes. Because of laws that will likely change with the upcoming election (assuming a certain political party wins...), plans have to be submitted before Christmas and so for us, that means before we leave. This has added a somewhat intense element to our already jam-packed schedule before our departure. However, we feel so blessed to have been given this amazing gift.

The ball only started rolling officially 2 weeks ago, when the town planner, surveyor and architect determined that the project is feasible. We have been meeting regularly since. We went to a satisfying session at the architect's last week where they presented 3 concept designs for us to peruse. After a rather stressful week of arguing about what we want for our new home, we were pleasantly surprised at what came back!

We have decided to go green and build an ecologically friendly home. The plan is to only use passive heating and cooling to keep the house at constant temperatures of between 18-22 degrees celcius all year round. So we'll have huge waterbags underneath the house, super-insulated everything, roofs to maximise solar panelling, rely on evaporative cooling and solar hydronic underfloor heating. Ok so the underfloor heating is not so passive! But it will only cost only about $5-$6 to run per year thanks to the lovely sun.

We are both heat averse people. DH virtually lives in a 19 degree environment being in operating theatres most of the time. So we are somewhat nervous about dropping our beloved air-conditioning unit. The other thing that I may have to give up is the bamboo floor which I love so much. It apparently doesn't have enough thermal mass...

Today was a presentation of the "amalgamated" plan. They have taken elements out of each of the 3 designs and consolidated them into the one plan. I LOVE it! The next step is to configure the whole design in 3D. I can't wait until next Monday. We still have 17 days to finalise everything...piece of cake!