Boys will be Boys!

On Thursday when we were at Kirsty's house William, Oliver and Heath decided that they were going to raid Amelia's costume collection and they all dressed up as fairies! William sashayed around the room swishing his mauve dress while Oliver watched on, gracefully waving his arms like a butterfly.

Here we see Heath holding Maisy the Mouse and walking as if he had been on catwalks all of his life. He even has that somewhat vacant expression that models often adopt.

Heatwave

We are in the midst of another heatwave. On Tuesday this week the temperature was 45.7C and it has been 44C since. It is unbearably hot, dry and windy outside. I have had to let all of the chickens out to free-range all of every day simply so they can find a cooler spot under a tree. I have even been putting ice cubes in their water.

It has been very difficult to keep the boys amused inside. Yesterday we visited Kirsty and today we went to see Marianna but apart from that Britta and I have been trying to come up with interesting things for the boys to do inside. Today they enjoyed pasting, cutting and stamping and each made a colourful collage.

Ladybugs and Bees

Someone is always dressing up at our place. We have a couple of big boxes of dress-up clothes and I am adding to them all the time. I have found that op shops and garage sales can be a great source of costumes and accessories. Only last week we found a new St Vinnies op shop and I purchased a long red wig suitable for a clown. Here you can see the boys dressed as a bee and a ladybug playing in our garden.

Just Tickled Pink

It is the Australia Day long weekend this weekend. Rowan has come over from Sydney for a visit. Yesterday we went to one of Oliver's favourite places - 'Just Tickled Pink'. It is a cafe near our house which specialises in ultra-delicious cupcakes. Rowan kindly treated us all to a cupcake and coffee. William chose a Mars Bar cake, Rowan chose a Banana Caramel cake, Oliver selected their signature pink iced cake, and I chose a trifle cupcake. Inger showed great willpower and resisted. Oliver has a current passion for collecting china cups so he was in his element!

This shot shows just some of the pretty cups which adorn the cafe.

The cafe also acts as a gallery for the owner's personal collection of Audrey Hepburn memorabilia.


A selection of the mouth-watering home-made cupcakes.


Today we invited our dear friends Margaret and Peter and their two girls Kate and Alice over for a barbecue. The boys adore Kate and Alice and had a ball playing with them for the entire afternoon. It meant that the rest of us could have a fairly relaxed afternoon sipping champagne and chatting around the table out under our shady tree. It was just such a wonderful day. The boys fell asleep at 6.30pm while I was preparing their shower. We just slipped them into bed, grubby little feet and all so they could dream about their lovely day. They are very social little boys.

Summer Days

We had a fairly cool December but January has brought some hotter days. We dug out our old game of totem tennis and have been having fun playing tennis in the back yard. We are all fairly mediocre at hitting the ball but it has us all laughing and that is the main thing!

Britta and I took the boys to Tusmore park last week. It has a lovely big toddler pool with fountains in the centre. The pool is covered by a big sail which makes it very pleasant on a hot day.

Splashing and jumping in the water makes for a big appetite.

William has always had a keen interest in collecting and examining rocks and stones. He climbed down into the creekbed at the park and enjoyed himself fossicking amongst the rocks. He was also keen to peer into a stormwater drain which he said was the home of a monster!

Baking Cookies

It was a really hot today so it wasn't possible to spend much time outside. We have been giving the playdough a pretty good work-out lately so I decided to swap it for real dough. The boys are always very excited at the prospect of cooking. They cooperated very well with all of the steps in making gingerbread biscuits. They especially enjoyed using the cookie cutters to press out hearts, pigs, stars and teddy bears. They were very careful when they were mixing and measuring and made some very good biscuits.

Four Little Monkeys!

This morning my friend Marianna brought two of her sons, Joshua and Marcus, to our place to play while she attended a doctor's appointment with her new little baby, Maddelena. The four boys got on like a house on fire. Both Oliver and William love playing with older boys so Joshua was definitely popular. I took William out to the supermarket to do my weekly shop while Britta held the fort for an hour. William enjoyed the luxury of my undivided attention. Demonstrating that he was a very big boy he went to the Wendy's ice cream shop by himself, asked for a rainbow ice cream and paid for it. He came back with a smile from ear to ear. He (and I) was so proud of himself.

When we arrived home all of the boys clamoured for an ice block and proceeded to eat their way through our current stock. I guess this is a sign of things to come! I couldn't resist this shot of them all on the couch watching Toy Story and eating ice blocks.