Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

And this one’s PINK

This award originated from Me and my Drum

To accommodate a variety of blog themes, I have created three different “flavors” of badges: Creamy Cabernet, Midnight Oil, and Pink Smoothie.

Earlier this year I was tagged with the blogging tip meme in which the tip I offered was “Be the Blog“. That phrase stuck with me because I think that really sums up what a successful blogger does. And what I mean by successful is that they make it their own, stay with it, are interactive with their readers, and just plain have fun.

Since then I’ve been thinking about creating an award of my own, but with so many out there, it’s hard to find a niche that remains untapped for recognition. So I said, “What the heck?”, and decided to shape the phrase into an award called (you guessed it): Be The Blog.

To be fair, Lightening did award this to me in honour of my beautiful PINK baby.

Without further ado, I’d like to pass it on to:

Chookie’s Back Yard
Organising Queen
and Katrina

Well, perhaps I should say the “little” move. Since where we’re moving is about 500m from our old house. Tomorrow. While the in-laws have been WONDERFUL, it will be nice to be in our own place, with our own stuff again. And working on getting into a routine with Miss Moo (who currently thinks it’s kick Mummy play time).

The new “house” is actually a small duplex. Probably the same size living areas as what we had, but with one less bedroom, and no yard. At all. Ok, there’s this little patch of grass down the side of the house that currently is a bog hole has a fair bit of water sitting on the surface. But it’s about 1m wide x 10m long. Barely a cricket pitch (sorry Kelley  ). But it’s brand new. As in, no one has ever lived in it before. As in the builder settled it with our landlord on Monday.

Hopefully next week sometime I’ll have some pictures for you. I don’t plan on unpacking TOO much, and I want to chuck some more stuff out too. Preferably half of what we have. We did some window furniture shopping on the weekend, contemplating upgrading our bed to a king size (apparently Miss Moo thinks co-sleeping is a good idea), and downsizing our lounge suite and dining suite to something a bit smaller. I’m hoping it won’t be desperately necessary, but something we can do as we find things we like.

So, the fun part unpacking begins. But hopefully this is the end of the saga, and you won’t have to listen to me whine talk about it anymore.

A million months A couple of weeks ago, Meg awarded me some beautiful bloggy bling.

Which is nice. Cause I’m all about the love.

And to prove it, I’d like to give this award to:

Dancing With Frogs
Ali at Our Patch
and Louise at My Journey to Eliminate Debt

Thanks Meg

And Lightening gave me more pretty bling, but I’ll have to get to that later this week. And if anyone else has felt sorry for me passed on more bling in the, oh, two months I’ve been too lazy to struggling to keep up with everything, feel free to remind me about it. Because otherwise I’ve forgotten

Just a short post to let you all know my About page has been updated from nothing to share a little more about me and links to posts you might find useful if you’re wanting to know more About ME!

You’ll find it just below the header image, where it says Home, then About. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago (before our plans for moving were completely screwed up changed) we saw a financial planner. After the sale of our house we have a reasonable amount of cash currently sitting in a fairly high interest account. Since we don’t envisage settling anywhere long enough to be worth buying a house in the near future (now it appears at least five years) we thought we might do something constructive with it.

Being a small town, I knew the financial planner, by reputation if not in person. So I was a little sceptical. She has, however, come up with a solution that I think I can live with (being very risk adverse), AND a few ideas that should end up saving us $10k - $15k a year. Which is huge when you think about it.

Being the increadible conservative I am, I have checked out everything she said, and I will be seeing the accountant this afternoon to ensure that it’s all correct, before we make any moves. But, within a couple of weeks we’ll be “investors”. Which is a little scary considering what the market is doing right now. Or we might be getting a bargain. I guess that’s part of the whole risk thing she keeps talking about.

And now to figure out what to do with all the money she’s saving for us. Maybe a holiday somewhere….

You may have noticed the absence of Menu Plans over the last few weeks. Living with the in-laws has not been conducive to keeping me organised.

I haven’t been completely useless though. I have used the time to plan out a 4 week menu plan using some simple recipes which I will begin sharing in two weeks time. We are moving into our new house this week, and are away the following week, so starting the 10th of March I’ll start by sharing week 1 of my menu, along with a simple recipe. Most of these recipes are reused for other dishes. For example I use the same bolognaise sauce for 4 dishes etc. Eventually I hope to have shared all four weeks menu’s, along with recipes for all of them.

In the meantime though, if you’re looking for inspiration for your menu’s, be sure to check out Laura’s site to see what everyone else is eating this week.

Like today. I took Meg to the shops, just the two of us. It was sweet, for 5 minutes until she started crying the shopping centre down. Drama Queen, just like her mother sisters!

But what really made me happy. Chopping boards that can go in the dishwasher. Nice.

Hey, I had to get something new for the new house!

I alluded last month to a situation that had thrown into doubt our move to The Big Smoke. Well, it’s now been finalised, and I can share with you the frustrating change of plans.

Early last month, Hubby mentioned that a complementary company he deals with through his job had expressed interest in offering him a job. Being very pregnant I ignored this warning sign, and foolishly presumed that it wouldn’t be anything that would interest us.

However, when the official letter came, it left both of us in shock. The job they were offering was a management position, and the pay reflected that. In fact it equated to a 33% increase to what Hubby is currently earning. More than that, the job includes such perks as a car, phone and laptop, but most importantly it’s the career move he’s been wanting to make and working towards for some time.

Which really was the deciding factor. Due to the cost of living here (ie high!) financially we’re not THAT much better off at the end of the day. But the long term payoffs are worth it. Part of the move to The Big Smoke was to further things in this direction, but it was looking like another 18 months before it would come to fruition.

SO, it looks like we’re staying around. Hubby signed the contract last week, and handed in his resignation. We’ve found a small house to rent (pictures to come) and are moving in next week. It’s sad that I’m not going to be moving closer to my family and friends at this stage, but I’m hopeful that a couple of years experience will help Hubby find a similar job in The Big Smoke that we can move to eventually.

And I guess I’d better get used to torrential rain and flooding.

Saturday morning was the first of what I suspsect will become a regular and long term event for our household.  Our first ever dancing lessons.

Being so close in age, we struggle with letting M&M do something while Kiki misses out. M&M could have started ballet a year ago, but because Kiki was not old enough, we held back. I’m not sure if we did the right thing, but I can’t imagine trying to keep a 2 year old happy while her big sister gets to try all these new things. And they’re such good friends that I can imagine some real resentment developing.

Anyway, Saturday was the first lesson. And if you want to see cute, find a “tots” ballet lesson to watch. 12 little 3 and 4 year old girls in varying degrees of fairy costumes, ballet costumes and dance pants prancing around the floor. I can’t remember laughing so hard in ages.

Both the girls seemed to really enjoy it, M&M more so than Kiki, although I think Kiki is taking the whole “ballet” thing a bit more seriously than M&M. I will say this though, 30 minutes of jumping and dancing around certainly wears them out we had a nice quiet afternoon here. Kiki even had a sleep (unheard of!).

While this is just a start, I hope they continue with dance in some form or another. I did Calisthenics as a child, and then ballroom dancing as a teenager, which, incidentally, is where I met my Hubby. And the best part (from Mummy’s perspective) is that these classes are all “just for fun” and run through the PCYC - so $5 a lesson is a great bargain for me. Especially when I pay more than 4 times that a week for swimming lessons.

I know, anoher one. You’d think I’d be just happy with a baby .

I discovered while I was in hospital that my phone has pretty much had it. It’s 3 years old, and has been well and truly used and abused. I did get a new one about a year ago, but an unfortunate incident involving London Zoo, a hot chocolate and the severe lack of rubbish bins in London last May resulted in it being an unfortunate waste of money.

So while I was in hospital and my phone wasn’t charging, but was working plugged into the power, but there was no signal where the power point was  meant that it was effectively useless as a mobile phone. So on Friday, during my first excursion with all three children on my own (eeekk!!!) I bought myself a new one.

The Nokia E51. Oohhh yeah. Except mine is black. And classy. I love metal phones, they seem to cope better with the inevitable landing on the ground that is so common to my phones. It does 300 times what I need it to, but jeez it’s nice. Of course, while I love getting new phones (who doesn’t love new gadgets??) I am seriously over the whole setup process. Trying to get everything just the way you like it. Copying over phone numbers from the old phone, setting up ring tones, backgrounds, etc etc. Still, it’s giving me something to do during the night feeds