Category: Diary

Bert invites his Uncle to dinner.

After an incredibly blustery morning that had everyone’s nerves on edge Sunday’s wind storm brought Mary Poppins and the Poppinets (aka my sister Helen, along with sister Kate and mum) to our house.

We didn’t need any prompting or that hard of a push to leave them in charge of the kids so we jumped in the car and headed off to Williamstown for a spot of Vietnamese for lunch. It was too windy for a stroll so we headed up the road to the Sun and caught a film. Even better, after a bit of research to check it was okay, Rae and I enjoyed a bottle a champers as we watched ‘Death At A Funeral’.

So, that’s no kids, a lunch where we could order whatever we wanted, a movie and a bottle of bubbly; how could the day get any better? Well, when you get home to find your house cleaned top to bottom and dinner waiting for you life becomes pretty good. It’s amazing what a difference removing all that dust makes. Combine that with the fact we didn’t have to worry about Saturday lunch either as Rob and Zita sat the kids while we went to finalise house details and we came back to a cooked lunch. Talk about being spoilt rotten.

Before the sisters and mum flew away I took them out to see our block. Well, I attempted to. You see I had never actually driven to the block before, I’ve always been a passenger. Yes, I got lost going to our own block of land and not just once, but twice. I’m never going to live that one down. All I can say in my defence is that I was born and raised in Shepparton, the most grid-based country town you could wish to find. Once you throw in a bend, a curve, another bend, another curve I could be anywhere. We’re going to have to buy a new Melway or get sat nav if I’m ever going to find my way home.

Either that or I’ll give Helen and a call and follow the umbrella.

Congratulations to Michael and Karen on the birth of Lily Ruth (I see that Michael didn’t get his wish to name his daughter Skye – check the blog as to why he may have wanted to). Those at the GF BBQ this year were all warned not to startle Karen as she very close on the day. Glad to see she made it home and then some.

Well done guys, we can’t wait to meet her.

It’s photo time – Mama’s boys.

Wow, this blog sure is empty. One post in a few weeks which was admittedly some pretty big news for us but surely something else has happened over that time.

Well, not really, I’ve just been incredibly busy with work and save for stressing about our new mortgage there’s been precious little time for anything else. We’re now on to our third lender, thanks to some unforeseen problems with long service leave, but we think we’ve got it all sorted now and we’re all set to pay up on time. Fingers crossed.

We did go for a walk in Yarraville today. I spotted three signs to add to my collection but forgot to take my camera. Grrrr. We were going to say hi to Jenny at Chalk but she was run off her feet. Bert loved almost everything in the store so I don’t think it will be long before we return.

Rae’s even found time to do some video. So if you’d like to see young Bert in action, check him out below getting down to the Play School theme.

Oh dear, it looks as though Rae and I will be up against the wall when the revolution finally comes. Yes, we will soon be part of the landed gentry.

Today we signed our lives, and an obscenely large amount of cash, over to a real estate agent to secure our own plot of this earth. We won’t be building straight away, hopefully that will start early next year but for now we can spend our weekends sitting amongst the weeds and dreaming of the house to come.

An ‘extra’ child, a rental house falling down around our ears and several years of hard saving has finally put us in the position of looking for a house of our own. We’ve been keeping track of the market in areas we want, even put an offer in on a place where we were pipped at the post by $4K. After we lost out on that one, and knowing what was available, we decided we would be better off building.

Now, I remember when I was 10 years old and mum and dad decided we needed a new, bigger house (and that was only with two kids!). There seemed to be endless days of being bundled in to cars, driving for hours on end looking at houses and empty blocks of land. It was the most boring thing imaginable to a young boy and seemed to last forever. Eventually they settled on an AV Jennings design and ended up buying the display home (the Crestwood Deluxe from memory).

Phee, Bert, Henry and Kennedy have no idea how lucky they have it. We’ve been looking for months and today is the first day they’ve had to come with us, and that was for a quick forty minute trip. Google has saved them the horrors of my childhood. We’ve used Google to find houses, construction companies and land. We’ve used Google Notebooks to keep track of options and questions we need to ask. We’ve used Google Docs for spreadsheets to track auction results. We’ve used Gmail (Google email) for communicating with agents and each other. We’ve used Google Calendar to plan the couple of visits we’re making to display homes and we’ve used Google Maps & Google Earth to research land options, surrounding areas and planned amenities such as schools and shops. When we finally make a decision and then move in it truly will be the house that Google built.

It’s no surprise that I like taking photos of my kids, Bert especially ’cause he just loves the camera, and there’s been a couple I’ve been really happy with over the past couple of years and though ‘gee, that’s not a bad photo’.

Well yesterday we found out what a difference a professional photographer can make. Richard had his magic bag of tricks at the Grand Final BBQ and took some amazing photos. You can check out his work from the day on his website, RXA Photography.

Miss Trish raises The Anthony Malloy Memorial Footy Tipping Trophy (aka The Ugliest Trophy In The World) as the winner of this year’s footy tipping competition.

Well done Trish, but everyone is now fired up to take it off you next year.

One of our little luxuries is to have The Age delivered on the Weekend, it’s great to have it waiting there for you when you wake up and you can start the day properly with coffee and the sports section.

This morning we heard the car pull up and the double thud of the papers landing in the drive. Excellent. Ten seconds later the car was back, door open, scamper scamper, door closed and car drives off. Fair enough, they must have delivered the wrong paper and were replacing it. We both rolled over and tried to ignore the grumbling babies and kids.

How naive we were.

Some dastardly rat had pulled over and nicked our paper.

If it happens again I’m going to have to take a leaf from Daniel’s book and become a newspaper vigilante. Newspaper thieves of the inner west, you have been warned.