I’ve been a bit lazy about this! Jaxon starts school in two days and it’s all about closing doors and opening windows in this house. Even Dexter will be starting a half day of child care on Friday…this Mamma is not liking letting go of all her babies all at once!

Jaxon: Mum, are we going out for dinner tomorrow night?
Mum: Nope.
Jaxon: Are we going out for dinner the day after tomorrow night?
Mum: Nope.
Jaxon: Are we going out for dinner the day after the day after tomorrow night??

In the car, passing a new McDonalds that two days previously hadn’t even been half built.
Mum: Wow.
Dad: See, I told you. Shocked me when I saw it too.
Jaxon: Yeah…it shocked my head off too when I saw it. It shocked my whole body off!

And then, randomness from the boy at dinner tonight. I have no idea where this came from, or why it came to be either!
Jaxon: Mum, we have to make a great big meatball…and paint it blue.
Mum: Um, o-k…

Our landlords promised to frost over the open window at the front of our house so that people wouldn’t be able to see through at night time. It’s one of many lies they’ve told us to get us in to this house.

To rectify this problem…I paint!

It looks awesome at night time from the outside!

29th November 2011 – 10th December 2011

Grandma took Jaxon to see the Werribee Open Planes Zoo. This is about the only photo she took with the camera. Apparently…it was too hard to push the button so she took her photo’s with her phone. I don’t have those pictures

Dexter loves his Grandma!And finally, Tim and I learned that Grandma’s are excellent for flogging off the things you can’t be shagged doing to. Christmas tree’s are so annoying to put up!

Thank you Grandma for your visit. We look forward to seeing you again soon!

I’ve got some catching up to do…so forgive me if these posts are a little out dated

If I add these birds to the two mobiles I made with them, I think I may have made over 250 paper cranes!

I never want to see another bird again!

Have I told you how much Dexter can eat?

The boy can eat! And he’s so messy! We had no idea how lucky we got it with Jaxon not wanting to get his finger’s dirty in his food! Dexter on the other hand, if it’s within arms reach…it’s going in the mouth!

The other day I caught him wondering about the house with a soapy bit of steel wool in his mouth! When I took that off him, I also found the Rinse Aid for the dish washer hidden away behind him. That’s when we decided to baby proof the kitchen properly I’ve taken flies out of his mouth, three day old biscuit thats been hiding under the table. ANYTHING!

Well, this is what he did to his cake for his Birthday BBQ. He was totally unstoppable. If we hadn’t taken the cake off him I’m pretty sure he would have eaten until his belly exploded.

He actually tried to eat the NUMBER ONE candle!

Like all little boys, Jaxon and Tim ( ) LOVE fire engines. So when the local CFS held an open day over the weekend we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take him along.

Chick Magnet!!Jaxon took this last photo. I think it’s framed very well for a four year old who has had to figure out how to press the button with a hand/arm that barely reaches it!

I understand that it must be lot’s of fun for you to be hacking my site to impress your zit faced friends. But please stop. I do not have the time NOR the ability to be chasing my tail around trying to figure out what the fuck you have done to my documents!

As I said earlier, I’ve been working on a few projects lately. This is the crane mobile I made for Jaxon’s kinder teacher. There is still one more bird to add but it will need to be made in the morning because Jaxon is going to colour it in and it will go right in the middle at the bottom.

There is about 4 hours of bird folding there. Three hours to make the hoops and three hours to hook up and thread the birds to fishing line.

Now to figure out how to package it so she doesn’t have to spend three hours untangling the birds!!

At the moment I feel like I have TOO MANY projects going all at once. Most of them, I can’t do while the kids are awake.

I started this project a few weeks ago. I’m going to make hundreds (well, at least 50!) origami paper cranes to hang from the ceiling that joins all of our bedrooms together.

I started these but then scrapped them, because I was trying to make perfect squares out of A4 paper. Which, is actually very difficult. When the squares are off even just a tiny bit…the birds come out messy and I’m anal retentive so that’s just not good enough.

I’ve got some new squares, cut for the purpose and have started again. Only this time I’m making a mobile out of them for Jaxon’s kinder teacher who is sadly leaving for a new job next Friday. So the ceiling birds will have to wait.

Before I decided to scrap these birds I wouldn’t let Jaxon touch them. All he does is break them and then I have to make more. I don’t know if you’ve ever made an origami crane but they’re time consuming. And though I’ve been making them since I was 9, I don’t want to have to keep replacing the one’s I let him play with.

When I decided to get the right paper to do the job the one’s I had already made became Jaxon’s to play with.

I didn’t tell him to colour code them. He did that all by himself. When he’s naughty Nanny and Poppy joke that it’s MY side of the family in him (“That’s the (insert Surname here) in him”)

I’d have to say that a more accurate statement is that when he does things like this…that is MY side in him coming out. Tim will tell you it’s anal. I will tell you it’s just well organized!!

The window in the back ground is my handy work too. When we first moved in the land lord/real estate agent told us they would have the window glazed over “in a few weeks” so no one could see through. As per many other broken promises from them, it’s been months now and still it hasn’t been done. So I painted my design on there with acrylic paints which can be scrapped off and redone as I please. I actually like it that way. I’m thinking about changing it again soon. I get bored easily

A few weeks ago Tim and I had an appointment to attend at the hospital together. On the way, Tim ran out of petrol and had to push his bike a good kilometer to the nearest petrol station. While I waited for a parking spot, in the off street car park we frequent, I got this news via text. I pulled in to the empty space and got out of the car to call Tim. Then I was running late so I rushed to get both boys out of the car and off to the appointment we went.

On return to the car park, it turned out that I’d actally parked in a NO PARKING space without even noticing. We got a $122 fine for doning that. Even though we technically PAID for the car to park in that particular parking lot. The last three spots in it are reserved as NO PARKING with a tiny little sign that no one takes notices of, because after all, you’re in a parking lot…which you pay to park in. Needless to say, we were pissed. It’s purely revenue raising bullshit that traps people in to parking in three spots that are not car parking spaces.

But I just found this interesting article and thought to share it with you because it made me giggle. I hope it makes you giggle too and wish I’d had just as many good excuses to get myself out of a parking fine!

This is the infringement notice this man recieved in 2004.

You can click on the image to get a clearer view.

This was his response to said notice.

New Zealand Police
Infringement Bureau
PO Box 9147
Wellington

Good morning,

INFRINGMENT NOTICE NS3735700

Yesterday, I was presented with the above infringement notice (copy attached for your records) while returning home from the Parachute music festival at Mystery Creek near Hamilton over the long Auckland Anniversary weekend. I had a most excellent weekend, but that is not why I’m writing to you at this time. Unfortunately, there are a couple of irregularities with the infringement notice that are causing me some consternation and hopefully you can clear them up or, preferably, forget about the whole thing entirely.

Firstly, the ‘date of offense’ is listed as the 23rd of June 1974 with the time being at or around half past six in the evening. This is of grave concern to me because I was not issued a drivers license until sometime in 1990 and I have no desire to be charged with driving while not legally licensed. I do not have a clear recollection of very much at all before I was three and a half years old, so I rang Mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that – coincidentally – I was born that day!!

Mum mentioned that I was born at around five o’clock in the evening on that day in Porirua, which is not far from Wellington. She also said Porirua was a bustling suburb of young, low-income people who were trying to get ahead. Back in the 70′s, people were coming to terms with oil shocks, high-inflation and wage freezes, but that’s not important right now.

For me to have traveled from Porirua to the foot of the Bombay Hills just out of Auckland by six thirty, I would had to have crawled into the first car in the hospital parking lot and headed for Auckland at around 1,000 km/h. For this reason, it is entirely possible that the constable who clocked me back in 1974 was holding his laser equipment upside down and instead of doing 116 km/h as per the infringement notice, it is more likely that I was doing 911 km/h.

This is where it starts to get really strange. The car that I must have crawled into had the same license plate number as the one I have now – AEH924 (according to the infringement notice). However, my car is a dark gray Nissan Bluebird SSS, with dual cup holders, 1800cc’s of grunt, air-conditioning and electric windows.

You will notice that a time-travel option is not included on this model, so that rules out any ‘Back to the Future’ issues and the car I was driving back then could not have been the the one I drive today.

This is clarified by the infringement notice which states that the vehicle was a Honda saloon. How this relates to my Nissan Bluebird, I cannot fathom. I can only hypothesize that, back in 1974, the first range of proto-type Hondas had an automated number plate changing mechanism (like on the A-Team) which were used to avoid parking tickets and facilitate safer getaways from burglaries, armed hold-ups and the like.

So to recap, it appears that on my birthday on June 23rd 1974, I crawled out of the maternity ward, hijacked a seriously high powered Honda saloon with an automated number plate changing mechanism, drove to Auckland at close to Mach 1, was pulled over approaching the Bombay Hills and unwittingly changed the automated number plate changing mechanism to show the same number as a car I would own almost thirty years later!! (The chance of selecting the same number plate is a mere 1 in 308,915,776 – so quite conceivable)

I am currently residing at the address listed at the top of this letter. I expect you will want to apprehend me fairly shortly now that we’ve established that I may have committed the following offenses:

- Grand theft auto (I probably stole the Honda as my parents drove a white Ford Cortina at that stage)
- Driving without a license
- Driving at a ludicrous speed using a motor vehicle
- Evading the law using an automated number plate changing mechanism.

If you could provide a clearer indication as to why the ‘date of offence’ is the same as my birthday, and why the vehicle make and type bears no resemblance to the number plate listed on the infringement notice, it would be appreciated. Mind you, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if we agreed to let this one go. I could really use the $120 dollars as I’m lowering my Nissan, installing excessively noisy waste-gate and boring it out for better performance in the street drags down Te Irirangi drive and around Weymouth.

Thank you for considering my submission, I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

(Signed)

Justin Lee

This was the response he recieved.

Lucky Git!

Dexter is taking after his big brother and forming the cutest ever mohawk. The only thing is it only sticks up when it’s wet!!

Jaxon’s Mow disappeared as soon as he had his first hair cut…so Dexter is never getting a hair cut!

(I have to dig out pictures of Jaxon’s one, his was super cute and stuck up without being wet or needing gel!)

This was floating about on facebook a few weeks ago.

One of my girls is a teacher and wanted something a little more exciting to put up on her classroom wall so I turned it in to this…

While Mum is sitting on the toilet…

Jaxon: It’s easier to wee if you stand up Mum!

Last night when we all returned home from dinner at Nanny and Poppy’s we knew something was wrong right away. Rory was not on his perch saying hello to us. So we called out a couple times from the kitchen and I whispered that I thought he might be dead. Sure enough, there was Rory, dead as a door nail on the bottom of the cage.

We’re not entirely sure why he died. He was only 4 months old. But it was my birthday and then the following day Tim was admitted to hospital for a possible repeat MS attack and we had two very late nights.

Normally, I take Rory out during the day for some sun and bring him in before it gets cold. But on those two nights, he got left out in the cold all night because I forgot he was out there. So maybe he got a cold. At least, I hope he got a cold because otherwise I wonder if I did something wrong in terms of his care. I hope not!

Jaxon handled it like a champ. He doesn’t quite comprehend that Rory wont be coming back. Or that Rory isn’t getting cold in the ground. But I think he’s starting to get it. We spoke about my brother Terry who died and how he died. And how he wont get to meet Terry because Terry is dead. We spoke to him about how Mum and Dad would die one day and that all of the grandparents and possibly some of his friends would die one day. We told him that’s how life is. People are born as babies and grow and live their lives but one day everything dies.

When he told me “Mum, I’m going to miss Rory” I patted him on his chest and told him that we all missed him, but that he would always be alive in our hearts” So he replied that Rory was going to make him die. This worried me, since I thought maybe he was taking the death thing too literally. But what he said after that was “If Rory’s in my heart it wont be able to beat” Bless him.

Jaxon and I went and bought three plants and we dug a hole and buried Rory and planted the tree next to him. We made up a little rock with Rory’s name on it so Jaxon would always know where he was.

We all miss Rory. It’s possible that I’m missing him more than anyone else because he would sit on my desk right here and chat to me while I did things. We’ll get another bird in a few weeks.

Jaxon is holding two texter’s connected to each other waving it around like a wand.

Jaxon: Mum look, I’m an ata-ka-dab-ka!

Mum: You’re a what?

Jaxon: An ata-ka-dab-ka!!!

Mum: Oh, you’re a Wizard!!

Jaxon: Yeah, I’m a lizard…ata-ka-dab-ka!

Way back in another life time, I worked with research animals at Monash University Animal House. A place where we looked after and bred all kinds of lab animals for research. Don’t hate me. You’ve been using products or getting medicine that was tested on animals all of your life. AND, even when they say they’re not tested on animals (ie: make ups) it doesn’t mean that every single other combination of the product wasn’t tested on animals before WATER was added to complete it.

I was only 19 at the time. It was my first job and the first person that I got to meet in the tea room was a girl named Kelly.

It all started off as a simple note left in her pigeon hole. Then one left in mine. Then, it became a competition to find the most creative way to leave letters for each other. I did one in a bottle. She wrapped one in aluminum foil. I used pegs to secure the edges and so on. When she drove herself (with Tonka) around Australia on her long service leave she took my pegs with her and sent me photo’s of them all over the place.

But after a while, our letters started getting longer…and longer. She would sit outside in the mornings with her dog Tonka having a few smokes and writing to me while I would sit at the lunch room table writing one to her. We’d spend all week writing about our separate lives and then we’d each end up with a 30 page letter by the end of the week.

In 2000, I hit a rough patch and Kelly took me in. I lived with her until I was just about to have a huge break down (my biggest by far) and moved back in with my Dad. I pushed her away. Stopped writing my letters and never started again. We lost contact and I’ve missed her ever since.

Once again, thanks to the beauty of Facebook, we’re back in touch. And writing letter’s again.

She’s just about to leave for Thailand. Every year she goes and volunteer’s to help with her most favorite animal in the world, Elephants. You can read about what she does and where she does it here. It’s AMAZING what she does to help these Elephants out of chains.

Well, when I found out I had 20 days to write a letter I decided to make it VERY LONG. I mean, mega long. It turned in to 147 pages of writing and sharing blog posts from here and my other blogs. I made up my own front cover, added a pretend table of contents, added quotes and had two fake “The Ends”

Here is the cover I made (I am so proud of my little bound book…I am going to bind every letter from now on)

And here is our page of quotes…

Dedicated to Kelly

*So enthralling that I shit my pants
Dexter  (2011)

*Best thing I’ve read since “Green Eggs and Ham”.
Jaxon  (2011)

*Now the questions of the universe have been answered.
Albert Einstein (1941)

*After reading this, I no longer need to paint.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1500)

*Winning.
Charlie Sheen (2011)

*Maybe she’s hiding “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
George Bush (2001)

*We Have a new Scripture”
Dalai Lama (2011)

*Best bang since the big one
Stephen Hawking (2000)

Over the years I’ve lost most of the letter’s that she sent so long ago. I know I have a few of them stored here and there in boxes that I never look in. But this time, I know just how special our letter writing was and I’m never going to throw out another one of her letters. I am going to buy a special box just to store them in, so I can always have them handy.

She’s gone for two months this time. I can NOT wait until she gets back so we can catch up in person. I have missed her and thought of her always and never forgotten the special friendship that we shared through letter writing alone.

Thirty Four today! Every year, for the next few months…Tim call’s me a cradle snatcher because he’s three months younger than me now.

I had a wonderful day. The boys all sat at the table and made me cards and then in the morning I got given little gifts from the boys to open and then Tim gave me a big pack full of professional painting brushes from my oil painting “teacher/idol” Bob Ross.

We went to Nanny and Poppy’s for dinner and they got me a choc orange mud cake from the Cheese Cake factory…basically just for me!! No one else really ate it. I can’t take a photo of that for you because it’s ALL gone…and I’m not weighing myself for another three months!

I had such a lovely day and I’d like to say thank you to my wonderful boys, and in laws and everyone that sent cards and emails and made phone calls to say Happy Birthday! It was a wonderful day!!

My Melbourne best friend Tasha was in a bit of a bind one day when she had to work and had no one else to look after her kids. I volunteered even though under normal circumstances I would have asked her to find someone else. I was terrified. I’ve never looked after anyone else’s kids and the thought of having THREE more was just….intimidating!

They did fine though. I guess I did too. Once they’d settled in they did everything I asked of them. They were perfect for me.

The best thing was they kept Jaxon out of my hair for the day!

This was when Tasha picked them up at about 11pm after her shift. About ten minutes after that…I looked pretty much the same!!