A bit of everything

Monsieur Romeo

How quickly time flies when you are having fun, or going to work! Here's a quick rundown on what's been happening at Homespun Headquarters:

Miss 10 spent most of this week in Canberra returning yesterday evening to a Mum that missed her heaps!

Speaking of yesterday, when I jumped in my car after work the temperature gauge said the outside temp was 29 degrees, nothing special except that it STILL WINTER!!!!! Crazy. It makes me a little nervous thinking about what this summer will be like.

Last weekend I gave our small walk in wardrobe a much needed makeover. I took everything out, removed shelves (OK, Mr Homespun might've done that part), filled holes, sanded, painted and then put new shelving in (Mr Homespun helped with that part too). The result is amazing, even if I do say so myself. Unfortunately I still have the task of finding homes for all the things I took out that really don't belong in a wardrobe. Ugh!

I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and received two new members to our family as a gift from my folks. I will post photos and introduce you to them soon.

That's about it. Now I'm off to spend a large chunk of the weekend in the backyard, preparing beds for spring plantings, cleaning out chook houses and perhaps some more work on the cubby (have I told you about the cubby? No? More on that later).

Hope you have a lovely weekend and a big Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.
xoxo

Weekends

As mentioned in the previous post, we attended a wedding last weekend, and between the ceremony and reception Miss 14 had her last game of netball for the year so it was a very busy day to say the least (try getting a teenage girl ready for a wedding, undoing all your hard work so she can play sport, and then get her ready again!).

It was a lovely day, a bit windy and although I haven't enjoyed our very dry and warm winter (not enough rain), I was thankful it continued, a winter wedding day is not the time you want the weather to change!

The bride unfortunately was very sick on the day with a cold. Poor darling! But she looked gorgeous anyway! I swear that girl could put a hessian bag on and still look glamourous, so looking good in her wedding finery was not difficult for her. And young Mr B looked very handsome in his suit too.

Poor Miss 10 was also unwell, the wedding ceremony was in the morning and the reception in the evening and she slept for almost 5 hours between the two. But she put on a brave face, and both of them scrubbed up well. This is them at the wedding:

and this is them last week (you can just see their henna tattoos)...

We have also had zone athletics carnivals, jury duty and heaps of work on. Mr Homespun was made redundant a few weeks ago and although he quickly found more work, it is unfortunately in Wollongong! So each Monday he packs up his stuff and we don't see him until Friday or Saturday. So that, along with my work, Miss 10's dance lessons, Miss 14's netball and training and both of them attending gymnastics, leaves me with very little time for anything else. Needless to say, the house is a bit of a mess and there's a lot of washing to catch up on.

So that's my plan this weekend, doesn't sound exciting but this is the first weekend in many months where we have no plans, so I will be puttering around, catching up and just generally being grateful to have us all together under the one roof for a few days.

Hope you have a lovely weekend too!
xoxo

OK, so this post has been sitting in draft for a week so everything is a bit out of date, but here it is anyway...

How quickly the last couple of weeks have gone by. Last week we were even busier than usual and the next couple of weeks look to be the same.

I usually have one evening during the week where we have no plans, but even that was taken up last week with an Education Week assembly. Miss 10 received an award for her role as a 'Special Ed buddy'. Her local school has several classes for children with special needs and some of the year 5 kids give up their lunch and morning tea breaks to help assist these kids. We are very proud of her for doing this and for her award.

Next weekend we will be attending a wedding (yay!), my cousins's son is getting married, and the bride is from Bangladesh. So last weekend we attended a Gaye Holud ceremony for the happy couple. It was  loud and colourful and very interesting. The bride- and groom-to-be were painted with turmeric and fed by family and friends.

So we have since attended the wedding, I will post details later!

xoxo

Tassie part 2

Following on from last week's post...

The Bay of Fires, which truly lived up to it's name, you can see the very heavy smoke in the background from burning off nearby...

The penguins that come in each night at Bicheno, it was a wet and horrendously cold evening so we didn't stick around long enough to get any more photos!

Oysters at Freycinet...

and then back to Hobart where the weather cam showed snow on Mt Wellington and the clouds looked promising, so we headed straight up there...

... for an enormous snow fight! The kids (and myself) hadn't seen snow before so there were snow angels and snow men and bloody cold hands! We were so incredibly lucky, we had heard the mountain had been closed off but it was still open when we got there however the snow quickly turned to ice and the road, which is incredibly steep and narrow, was closed the next day.

Then next morning it was off to the world famous Salamanca markets and then on to Port Arthur...

... which is no doubt one of the saddest places in the world.

But we also had some fun there, with the ghost tour that night. Port Arthur is home to the second most haunted house in Australia. Bloody scary!

Then it was back to Hobart and home again!

Heaps of fun had by all.

xoxo

The sourdough starter

I started my sourdough starter a couple of weeks ago and quickly learnt what happens when you don't feed it everyday... it gets mouldy!

So I threw it away and started another, this time making sure I feed it every morning and after almost a week I am pleasantly surprised with the results. It smells very fruity and has lots of tiny bubbles, something I was sure wouldn't happen for a lot longer as it is winter here.

I have now reached the stage that always bothered me about sourdough starters, throwing most of it away each day. Argh! But this is also the stage where I am adding 100g of flour and 100ml of water to it every day, if I wasn't throwing some of it away it would fast take over the kitchen!

I have also been utilising this site to help me along the way. I didn't get the rye and spelt flours I originally planned simply because the supermarket I shop at doesn't have rye flour and their spelt flour is ridiculously expensive! So I am just using plain old plain flour. I have heard that if you use just one type of flour your sourdough has a sharper taste so I will eventually add different flours at some time, one of the things I love about sourdough starters is that they can stick around for years!

But only if you feed them...

xoxo

Tassie Part 1

I know I've been promising it for a while, but here's our Tassie holiday! This post is very heavy on the photos.

We went to Tassie with Mr Homespun's parents and his sister (and her family, minus one niece and one nephew) and we had a ball!

At Sydney airport, ready to go!

Our campers, ready to set off.

At the Salmon Ponds I spotted this and commented to Mr Homespun that it looked like the perfect spot for a...

platypus!!! We were all very excited to see this fella.

Then to Russell Falls...

then Nelson Falls.

We stayed in Strahan...

... visited Cradle Mountain...

and then we went to Beaconsfield, did the chairlift over Cataract Gorge, visited a cheese farm and a lavender farm, saw part of the Targa Rally (we had managed to miss it for the first few days and just when we thought we had avoided the road closes we crossed paths with it, ironically just outside of Targa!) and that was just the first few days!

More soon.

xoxo

Today's kids

Whilst weeding the vege garden on the weekend, I came across this plastic fork. When questioned Miss 14 advised me it was from a game of Masterchef they were playing in the backyard a while ago.

Today's version of mud pies, perhaps?

xoxo