The long awaited new shopping centre opened up around the corner from us on Monday and not surprisingly I managed to make it there to check it out on its first open day with Tess after school. There were thousands of people so it was a bit chaotic especially as I had quite a long shopping list but I can report that the shopping centre is great. It's got a fabulous supermarket which is arranged more in line with the UK supermarkets and is all the better for it. However, the thing I am most excited about is the fact that the supermarket has thousands of those kids sized trollies so getting Tom to come supermarket shopping with me is, from now on, going to be a lot easier!
After work on Thursday we threw everything into the car and headed up to the farm. The drive went quite smoothly although it rained almost non-stop and there was quite a bit of fog through the mountains. Once we were on the dirt road which takes us to the farm we saw at least 10 wombats - the first was a mum and baby standing in the middle of the road. Fortunately we saw them in time and went around them but Craig was not so lucky and managed to hit 2 kangaroos - we don't think there were any fatalities but there is an impressive dent in his bumper!
On Friday morning we had a typically early start so had fed the cows and gone down to the wombat hole by 9.30. Given that it was a bit drizzly we decided to head into Rylstone for a spot of lunch. The big boys got stuck into pints of stout, we all had huge plates of simple but rather good food and the kids ran around pretending to be dingos in the garden of the hotel where we had lunch - Happy days! The kids were all tired and emotional so we took the scenic route home and all four of them slept for about 1 hour which was perfect and saw them through to bedtime.
Julia, Michael, Ryan and Maggie arrived on Friday at about 6.30pm which was very exciting for everyone but we were impressed with the kids as all 6 of them were in bed and quiet by about 8pm. We quickly fell into our normal farm routine which is up at the crack of dawn (although we did really well with two 6.30 starts!), breakfast consisting of bacon sarnies or "hamburgers" as the kids call them, a morning activity which is either a bush walk or feeding the cows, general playing around the farm by the kids whilst the parents collapse with a second cup of coffee, lunch, another activity which this time included playing on the hay bales in the barn (the bales are so high that the kids can reach the rafters and swing from them as if they were monkey bars), afternoon tea, more playing around the farm, dinner, bath and bed at which stage the parents tuck into too much food and wine until we fall into bed too - never much later than 10.30! It is winter now so the weather was quite overcast but it really didn't matter - the kids got very muddy and wet a lot of the time but it didn't stop us from being outside and the scenery was truly stunning with lots of low lying mists.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO KRISTIE!!! We hope you have a lovely day.
I leave you with some video footage of the kids having a disco on the deck - you can tell Tom's been going to dance classes?!
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