Random things

Reuben getting to grips with pedals at the skate park

Rowan will now go on the ramps at the skate park, in fact since he has realised he can do it, there's no stopping him!

The boys playing ipod games

Tree House at Clowance

Carharrack Park, one of the boys favourite parks

A fun day at Crenver woods with friends

Rowan's self portraits

Reuben the turtle!

Race For Life (for some reason the photos have not gone into here in the right order!)  This is me after I finished, 5 km in 39 minutes.  I was well chuffed

The start of the warm up for the race

Me and Lucy after finishing

Rowan has never liked mud pies, but he seemed well into on this day

What can I say, I found this little imp at the bottom of the garden!

?!

Aussie update

On 2nd August (5 months and 2 days after my application was submitted) I received the email I had been waiting for.....My visa, Whoop Whoop!  I am now officially a permanent resident of Australia.

Tris and the boys all have their Aussie passports now too.

So the time came to get booking, Flights are now booked, the removals are booked too and now all the accomodation is booked as well. 
We fly to Kuala Lumpur and have a stopover for 3 nights, then onto Brisbane for 3 nights, then up to the Sunshine Coast to our new life.  We have accommodation booked for 4 weeks, that should give us time to get work, work out which suburbs we like, find somewhere to live, get the boys booked into school to start in January and have fun too!

We have been clearing out the house and garden, dump trip after dump trip.  It is amazing how much c**p you accumulate when you live somewhere for 5 years!  We have car booted and the house is starting to look quite bare, still loads more to go though, but we are getting there.

The boys, so far....

This summer is really flying away.  Not so many photos taken as we are all just so busy at the moment.
I thought I would write a little catch up before putting on some more photos.

The last few months have seen the boys come on in leaps and bounds, Reuben has finished nursery.  We contemplated him going back in September for a month until we leave, but he made such good friends and they will have all gone on to school, that we though it would be best if he just stayed at home until he starts school in Aus.  He truly loved nursery though and as I have said, he made such good friends there, he really is a social animal and thrives in groups (especially if he can make people laugh!)

Rowan has been doing really well with his home school, he now reads anything and everything.  He especially loves reading books to Reuben.  He is doing the library reading challenge again this year and is getting through his books very quickly to get to the next stage in the challenge. 
We have been going swimming regularly over the last few months and since going to Clowance pool, where he can't touch the bottom, his swimming has improved loads and his confidence has also grown.  He now knows he can swim, and he loves it.  He would be swimming every day if he had the opportunity.  It's so nice to see him so confident in the water :)

The boys are looking forward to Australia,  they both have their different worries about it.  Rowan is concerned about how hot it will get and Reuben will miss everyone.  But we are making sure they express any worries and the general mood about it is positive.

Those little things

When swimming with Rowan one day he suggested that I hide behind a tower in the pool and he would swim around the side.
"Mummy, this channel can be the Suez canal and you can be a somali pirate waiting on the other side" 

I did laugh my socks off, talk about a politically up to date 5 year old!
(This is after learning about where our belongings will go on the ship to Australia, as they now don't go through the Suez canal due to the pirates and it therefore takes twice as long as it used to)

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Reuben has now finished his nursery placement.  On the second to last day when talking with his key worker, he said to her, " Kathryn, do you know what will happen after I leave Windmill Nursery?"  She assumed he would say something about moving.  "I will be older!"

Crickey, I said I wouldn't be long now I've got loads to post!

Reuben has done something to our camera, now the lense keeps falling out.  So we all use Rowans camera (much to his disgust!), but it's fun when I come to put the family snaps onto the computer I find all these random ones that Rowan and Reuben have taken with all these mad settings that I have no idea how they do it!

This is Reuben stirring Herman the German.  We were given a batch of this starter for a fermented friendship cake, we had to stir him every day and feed him too, then you split him into 4, bake one and pass the rest on.  Reuben loved going into the kitchen every morning to see how much Herman had grown.  He also tasted delicious when finished!

Rowans randoms

A rare sight of Tris' baking, yummy fish pie

Reuben has recently declared that he doesn't like the beach, when asked why he said, "Because I just love throwing sand and I am not allowed to on the beach!", So he throws it over himself in the garden instead

Dave, the boys godfather, came over one Sunday for a lovely roasty and a trip to the park.  He also took part in one of Rowans photo sessions!

You can't quite make it out in this picture but this photo and the one above had a weird red glow to them

More of Rowans special effects

One Sunday afternoon, an inflatable live sized stonehenge that was touring the country came to Heartlands.  It was awesome.  It could take 100 people in one go, so me and the boys went on for a real fun bouncy session

What can I say?  It is an almost deflated balloon, not a black pudding!

Remembering those funny little things

So often the boys will say something that just tickles me and I think to myself, " I should write that down."  and I never do. So I am going to try to put some of them on here.

Reuben: "At nursery, Ben can't drink normal milk, he has to have Ben's special milk.  And he can't eat cheese.  But he can have raisins"

Today we have discovered that Rowan has some veruccas.  Reuben comes down to the kitchen after tea really upset, real big tears bursting out.
Me: "Whats the matter?"
Reuben: "Rowan won't let me touch his verucca because he says I will get it."
Me: "Well that's right, they are very contagious"
Reuben: "But, I want a verucca!"
This then went on for about 15 minutes of him being really upset because he really wanted a verucca too!

Crickey, Where's June gone?

It seems that I only get a chance to update this once a month at the moment.  I should try and do it more often but we are so busy that it just slips off my important to do list.  But tonight I am having a night off sorting and decluttering, Tris is out climbing, I have a glass of wine and some choccy and I thought I will sort through the photos from the last month and pop them on here.

Where has June gone?  Time truly is flying by, we have only 13 weeks until our proposed day of moving out, WOW, that's come around quick!  We are doing ok with the sorting, a little everyday.  Lots of dump trips and giving away things to friends.

As for the paperwork side of things, Tris is still waiting for his certificate to prove he is Aussie so he can get his passport and hopefully I will get the official approval for my visa next month.

The boys are doing well, Rowan seems very excited about the move, he is looking forward to meeting his Grandad that he has never met, being able to wear shorts and crocs every day, but most of all he is looking forward to buying an inflatable crocodile!  The other day we were making a list of jobs they had to, to help with the sorting and I asked them to decorate it with pictures of things they thought of when they thought of Australia - Rowan said, "I don't know how to draw an inflatable crocodile!"

Reuben has been having a tougher time of coming to grips with it all and has been not wanting to go to nursery, but we have worked through that and even though it was hard he is back to loving it there and is even talking about going to school in Australia at circle time.

Anyway here is a mishmash of photos from the month.......

The boys posing in new jim jams

A sunny day out at heartlands, its truly great fun there and on a warm day the kids just love to run up and down the red river

Big boy Boo, getting there with the pedal bike, he is still unsure and would rather take his balance bike, but he is getting there

Rowan has been doing a healthy eating project, one activity we came across suggested trying 5 new foods and rating them out of 5 to encourage a wide range of food in your diet.  Well anyone that knows Rowan will know that he does not have a limited diet!  So in Tesco it was very hard to find 5 foods he had never tried.  We ended up with salsa, cheesestrings(?!), pickled red cabbage, a passion fruit (unripe!) and an onion bahji.  He said the cheesestrings and pickled cabbage was the best.

We did some multimedia art.  We printed out large black and white images of their faces and stuck them on some paper then let thier imaginations do the rest with some paint.  Rowan is a cool alien with golden glasses, pointy golden ears and an awesome golden handlebar moustache!

Reuben is a clown with a crown!

Blogger is being a pain in the bum tonight and I can't put anymore photos on, so that's it for now, but I will get the rest up soon x