Monday, October 20, 2008

Mulberries

I love, love. love this time of the year, the weather is so nice. The place next door to us has a mulberry tree in the back yard and there is no-one living there at the moment so we've been helping ourselves :)
Ruby and Clary are quite partial to mulberries too and I have learnt over the last few weeks that soda water is great for getting mulberry stains out of clothes. They prefer to wear at least one white thing while picking/eating mulberries, LOL.
When we raided the tree yesterday a bit of a tussle broke out over the bowl of berry goodness. As you can see Ruby had already done herself up as a cat earlier in the day. Yes, she was a cat, not a zebra as I first thought. Check out Clarys' mouth here, he looks as though he's been ripping heads of live chickens with his mouth or something. Yucko.
Anyway, they buried the hatchet to sit down and polish off the rest of them. They didn't leave anything in the bowl so we went back today to get some more to make mulberry pies. We still only came home with enough to make one little pie as they ate so many in between the tree and home.
I do think Clary won in the race to eat the most mulberries though.
Don't get between this kid and his food. He's scary.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Home

Back home again. We had a really good holiday (a few bloody awful days, but that's the norm for family holidays, isn't it? ISN'T IT??) and I didn't really want to come home, but as soon as we got here, oh, just so nice to be home.
The weather was pretty good, only got overcast and then rained on the last four days.
The kids loved the beach, more the sand than the water. They had some dabbling of the toes (Clary), and even a few quick dips in to the water (Ruby) but they were way more interested in just playing in the sand. Digging in it, rolling in it, throwing it. Oh, and of course, filling their pants with it. This castle is living out it last seconds here as Ruby moves in to destroy it. We had a great house to stay in, with everything we needed and straight across the road from the beach.
Ruby even went off to the movies with her Dad for the first time (on one of the rainy days). They went to see Wall-E and almost saw the whole movie before she announced "I want to go home"

Before we got to the beach we spent a week out west at the mother-in-laws'. Again, the kids had a blast, lots of kids to play with, went to the pool every day, spoilt rotten by many, many people. The road trip from Grandmas' to the beach, though,..............not so much fun. After seven hours driving on the first leg we opted for two rooms at the motel so MrSecondstitch and I didn't have to look at each other for a while. I debated for about half a minute about putting that bit in here as so many bloggers seem to have these lovely holidays where everything is blissful as they breakfast at gorgeous gourmet cafes and break up the road trips with visits to the wineries on the side of the road. We had breakfast one day at a darling little truck stop (can't beat them for a decent feed), and broke up our road trips with arguments, LOL. Travelling long distances with the whole family can be stressful.
So anyway after seven hours the first day, and about two hours sleep that night, we had another seven hours to go the next day. It probably would've been about 5 hours if I'd had a better look at the map, but really, is that even relevant? While we were out bush we went out to the sale yards (cattle) so Clary could see the trucks being loaded, as he is completely MAD about trucks right now. He was a happy boy. Fancies himself as a big truckie I think. Although with the level of excitement he displays when the garbage truck does its' weekly run I think he'd be just as happy being a garbo. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
OK, I hope I haven't bored you too much. Best I get to bed.

Oh, how could I not share this with you? We came home to a deep freezer which had been turned off for two weeks (Thank you MrSecondstitch. He got a little over-excited in his 'turn off all the power points rampage)
I would not even know where to begin describing the smell to you. I am a nurse and I have smelt some rotten stuff over the years, but our freezer totally won the stench war I tell you. My eyes were watering, and my nose just wanted to end its' life.
Don't let it happen to you.