Happy New Year

Hello!  It's that crazy season when one has trouble pausing for breath, but it's been wonderful.  We've delighted in the company of our kids and grandkids, friends and other family members over the last 2 weeks. 

We were slightly stressed pre-Xmas re getting the concrete done and getting our furniture in.  Concrete was finished and finally, on Dec 21st, 2 very nice strapping gentlemen with a big truck brought all our big furniture from the storage unit, and carefully carried it into the house for us.  Hooray!

On the 23rd Dec we excitedly awaited the arrival of our first house guests, our lovely daughter Michelle and her equally lovely partner Michael, even though he is a Geelong supporter.  :-)

 It was so lovely to catch up, sit and chat, eat yummy food and sample a variety of tipple.  :-)

 

Then on Boxing Day we welcomed our wonderful son Paul and gorgeous granddaughters Stevie and Riley.  One moment it was calm and peaceful then POW!  ha ha ha, don't you just love the Christmas bedlam look after littlies have madly opened all their presents.

We had lots of fun with the girls, they loved walking down the hill to see the kangaroos, who would take flight and jump over the fence, then Stevie and Riley would pretend they were kangaroos and jump around.  Here is Stevie looking very trendy with the sunnies propped over the curled hat brim, she explained to me that this was how you have to wear your hat and sunnies.

We went to the beach and we went to the park and we went to the playground.  And when we were all at home the girls had all their Christmas toys to play with.  Here is Riley with her toy digital camera that she loved.

 

We have two hammocks strung up in our peppermint tree forested area, it's a lovely lovely place to relax on warm days.  The girls really enjoyed having swings in the hammocks too.  We went for our kangaroo searching walk and came back via the hammocks and what did the girls find but Michael who thought he'd sneak off for a quiet read in the hammock.  Ha!  Found you Michael!  :-)

 Here's Paul looking relaxed and happy.  Was so good to have you to stay.  :-)

 We've said goodbye to them all now as they've returned home, and now we have the pleasure of the company of my brother and nephews.  They've gone off fishing and snorkelling today.  Go figure, we've had a week of warm, summy weather and today there is a gale blowing and it's cloudy and wild.  Oh well.  While they are amusing themselves Steve and I are starting to turn our attention to the many boxes of things we have yet to unpack.   Look at our poor shed, it's been a dumping ground for everything over the past month.  Slowly but surely we will work our way through it all.

On a wildlife front, I love it when I can look out of my kitchen window and see someone looking back at me.  This mum kangaroo is around a lot, isn't she pretty and just look at her beautiful joey.  The joey is rather large now, the poor mum's pouch is just about dragging on the ground!  It's interesting to watch her, she has taken to lying down and then turfing joey out of the pouch for a bit, and the joey leaps around like a crazy thing then dives back into the pouch.  She is turfing the joey out more and more so I guess it wont be long until joey is out for good.  It's also interesting to see that last year's joey still spends all his time with her, grazing alongside her.

 Look what else I spied out the kitchen window - bunny!  Bad bunny in fact, see here it's reaching up just about to nibble on one of my acacia plants.  Steve reckons he's dreaming of bunny pie, hmmm

 

 We've had some lovely skies and sunsets over the last week.  The jarrah tree in front of the house has a dead section at the top and the kookaburras love to sit on it and laugh hysterically.  This one was having a peaceful moment and I like the silhouette shot of it with the pink sky behind.

This was last night's sky, amazing isn't it. Looks like the fires of hell! There's another kookaburra sitting in the tree too.

 

 We've had a buy up of some new furniture.  We were a bit worried having a house with one big living area that all our different types of wood furniture would look weird together, but in fact we really like the assortment of warm wood colours.  We have wanted a decent sized coffee table for ages so when we heard that the local very nice furniture shop was having a big sale, off we trotted.  This is the coffee table we bought, it's beautiful.

 And when we found out it had a matching hall cupboard, and we had a entry devoid of a piece of furniture, well, that came home too!

And Steve is rapt.  The other thing we wanted was a big tv/entertainment unit.  We've been looking for ages, not finding quite what we wanted, but this one is perfect.  Now Steve has the fun job of connecting fifty trillion wires between all the electrical doodads ha ha.

I did a wee cruise around the garden with my camera yesterday.  Things are a bit neglected of late what with moving into the house and lots of visitors, but there are lots of interesting things growing.  This is our tiny new fig tree.  It's been in the ground for about 15 months, and sat there like a tiny stick until 2 months ago when it finally decided that it was happy and started growing like mad.  There are about 15 figs on it.  We haven't netted this tree yet so it will be interesting to see who gets to eat the figs, us or the parrots!

 The thing I am very excited about is pumpkins!  We've never grown them before.  I planted a couple of seeds downhill of the pig poo compost pile and they slowly but steadily took off.  The vines have gone crazy now the weather has warmed up, and upon poking around under the vigorous foliage it is very exciting to find beauties like this.

Another plant sprung up beside my compost bin and that too has produced many fat and healthy looking pumpkins.  These are a different variety, I think they might be called Japanese pumpkins.  We are looking forward to harvesting and storing them all.  Visions of gallons of pumpkin soup and many many pumpkin scones brings a smile to my face.  :-)

Steve has grown the most unbelievable onions, they are massive, quite a few of them weigh half a kilo each!  They are juicy and sweet and we are enjoying eating them roasted, or chopped up with our potatoes in potato salad.

 Tomatoes have been a bit of a disaster so far.  Remember when I bought those lacewing larva with visions of them gobbling up all the little caterpillars and bugs?  It was a big fail because of the storm the day after I released them, I think it killed them all as we haven't seen any since.  Needless to say, moths, caterpillars and bugs abound, and they love eating the tomatoes.  So many holes in them, not happy.  We have a biological insect spray and will have to use it as much as we'd rather not spray.  Then hopefully we will get to eat some of the many many tomatoes on the plants!

 Although they are struggling a bit with the dry ground I am rapt with my sunflowers.  I want to store the heads of luscious sunflower seeds and the bees are doing a fine job of fertilising the flowers.  Amazing how much the bees seem to love these flowers.  They are such a happy looking flower don't you think.  And on that cheerful note, I think I'd better finish this mammoth blog post!!