Australia Day

The 26th of January isAustralia Day and hopefully you were all clustered around the BBQ cooking a delightful variety of meat and vegies (yes BBQ vegies are a great taste).

Here are a few interesting facts:

• was not named "Australia Day" by all states until 1935
• it 1994 that all states celebrated consistently on that day as a public holiday
• a day to recognise outstanding contributions to the life of the nation through the Australian of the Year Awards, from 2004 presented in Canberra, previously it rotated through Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra.

I hope that you all celebrated in some way that makes it special to you. We spent the day at the coast at Tuross Head.

Pets galore

We are currently babysitting (rabbitsitting) a rabbit called Fluffy. Fluffy belongs to Joshua and Madeline who have gone to Disneyland (LA) and have asked us to look after her. AJR was exstactic. Millie was happy to have a friend, when Fluffy arrived, Millie looked into her cage with her best behaviour, Millie looked at Fluffy like children look at TV.

AJR graduated from Primary School

Whew it has been a long and exciting year for AJR. Last year of primary, and a graduation to finish it off. In the morning there was a ceremony celebrating all the achievements of the kids in year six.

A CD presentation where each child talked about what they thought about coming to school in Kindy (mum is scared, I am excited/scared) and what they thought about when returning to school in year six (good to be the leaders, good to catch up with friends, only one kid admitted to hating having to come back). After the ceremony we were all invited into the year six area, for morning tea. One of the special things that happened was that Debbie their teacher in Kindy and her first year of teaching was back to see them graduate, we all thought it was fantastic to have her come to say goodbye.

Here are Debbie, Clem, AJR and Isa with their graduation bears.

There was a lot of talk about what everyone was wearing to the graduation (mostly by the girls) and AJR thought that they were over the top in what they wanted to wear and how much it was going to cost. The day before the graduation he decided that he had to have something new after all - luckily the shops were opening late for the pre-Christmas rush and so we were able to find a nice white shirt and black slacks!!! I am sure he will wear them again sometime.


ready, steady, go!!!




Party time

Let's finish 2007

Before we get into the new year, there are a number of events that I will share with you.

In November we celebrated 50 years of married life for Barb and Al, JR's parents. We all travelled to Newcastle, about 500KM away. The roads are improving all the time (combined with lead feet) and we can get there in around 4 hours and 15 minutes on a good run. This is exactly what we did on the Friday night. We were running late, as usual, and did not get away until 7.30ish. I rang the hotel to let them know that we would not arrive until around 1am, instead of the 10pm that I had enthusiastically suggested earlier in the week. After a very short break of around 20 minutes, we arrived at the hotel in Newcastle at 12.15am. JR's brother and sister were staying in the same hotel. You will be pleased to know that our trip back took over 6 hours due to bad weather.

About 10am JR went over to the club where the celebration was being held in order to help set up. The kids and I walked up to Charlestown Square, looking for breakfast. We found Darby's pie shop, (a legend in Newcastle) where everything sells for $1.00 - what a bargain huntress I am. Armed with a variety of pastries we caught up with JR and went over to Barb and Al's for lunch, where everyone else was already gathered. It was lovely to catch up with Pat (who I had not seen in a long time), as well as brothers, sisters and cousins. 3pm and most of us gathered at the pixie photo shop in Myer's for a family photo shoot. We have bought a couple, although we do not have them yet. We went straight from there to the Kahibah Bowling Club for the party. We ended up driving over, which was good as we were able to run back to the hotel at least twice, for different people and different things. It was an excellent party and Barb and Al enjoyed themselves, which was fantastic.
Here are the photo's:

The happy couple

The speeches

Megan, Nicola, Mick (Megan's boyfriend), Cathie and Damian

Cutting the cake

Great Aunty Amy and Barb (Amy made Barb and Al's first wedding cake)

Stewart (Jim) and Dorothy

JR, Cheryl, Jim and Elyse

Brothers in arms
sing an ode to Scotland

Place mats depicting events of 1957

Welcome to 2008

Hi there,

for those of you wondering where I have been, I am now back! Over the next couple of weeks I will update you on various happenings over the last few months! Yes I have finally removed the Christmas counter as well - what was I thinking?


Cheers,
Mondo