21st Luau

My dear cousin turned 21 recently, and had a luau themed party. The
girls were soooo excited about the whole idea and we all had a fun
night. Such a beautiful girl - inside and out, and a delight to
reminisce over the many fun times we've had together. The four tiered
cake was delicious and looked fantastic - awesome as always Aunty Wendy.

Loving...

Aunty Tricia's new pool! As soon as we heard the pool was good to go, we
were down to try it out (or at least the kids were). Lots of fun, and
the best way to wear out small children quickly...they loved it. Olivia
also had the opportunity to feed the Kookaburras, so she was a happy
little pumpkin.

Birthday 2011

Had a lovely day for my birthday, with a pile-on Mummy cuddle to start
the day and a delicious home cooked dinner with cake and more cuddles to
finish things off. The girls had a 'lovely' crown for me to wear as the
birthday girl - which was to be worn while eating both breakfast and
dinner. Lots of laughs and fun with family - birthdays don't get much
better than that!

Some plants at last

The first of the plants went in today - it looked like there were a lot
until they actually went into the ground! Apparently they will be
lovely when grown and established - there's a
Crepe Myrtle, Lillypilly's, different types of grasses and some Japanese
Box among other things to go in - there's plenty more work to get the
rest into the ground sometime soon. Greg was very unwell today, so he
could do little more than water the plants once they were in the ground,
while Kev did most of the hard yakka. (Yes, he was very frustrated!).
Another couple of weeks before the rest of the plants arrive and are put
in, including an avenue of Magnolias (sounds rather grand doesn't it)
that Kev assures us will look good - given we know very little about
plants, we're taking our lead from him on what's going in.

Sports day

School had their Grade 1-3 sports day last week and Ellen had been
keenly anticipating it all. I was never very good at athletics (or
anything much outside of the pool), and from all accounts neither was
Greg, so I wasn't expecting more than a few hours of cheering her on in
whatever she was doing.
Turns out the little lass is somewhat of an athlete (or at least more
that I was), and despite not being well, she was determined to
participate and do her best in everything. She gave 100% in every event,
was a little whippet in the sprint and then came home and slept for two
hours in the middle of the day (unheard of!).
Her house team won at the end of the morning as well, so she was a happy
little poppet.

Snippets

Olly - they call her Olly at school. I don't know why, but I never thought of this as a nickname for her (and still don't really). Whatever the name though, this little lady comes up with the loveliest things to say at times, and has the sweetest heart for others. It's always interesting to see/hear how she views things - a little differently to the rest of the family usually.

A couple of Liv comments from recent times...

When watching 'Mary Poppins' and seeing the scene where the father is 'discharged' from his work, she asked what that meant, and when told he didn't have a job to go to anymore, her first comment was:
Oh well, he'll have to start shopping for specials now then won't he.
(Obviously my being frugal in the supermarket and other shopping expeditions is starting to wear off!)

We were talking about the drought in Africa and how many people over there don't have food to eat and have to leave their homes behind and walk to try to get some food - she was most concerned about this and we talked about different ways to try to help out with that - I let her come up with things first, and she thought sending some food over would help. I agreed that getting more food to them would help, but it would cost a lot to post, and a lot of food would go off before it reached them or wouldn't be any good. She quickly came back with: 

Marshmellows, we could send Marshmellows Mum - they're light and they don't go off do they?
Hmmm...we'll not quickly anyway, and yes they are light to send in the post, but...not quite the nutritionally rich food that they need over there I think somehow! We moved on to looking at options for sending money to help etc. from there, but everytime I see a packet of marshmellows now I am reminded of her concern for the starving in Africa, and her beautiful heart for others.