I know, I am WAY behind on updates. You are a patient bunch.

I will do them all now, a whole lot, but each in a separate post so I can tag them – so you have to promise to read all the way back to where you last left off. Yeah, long time ago.

So, here we are in 2010, and I am going to start the year with how the house is looking now, after some more jobs. Ok? Good-o.

Kitchen/Family Room

This is the room where we have knocked out the walls from the cage. Crappy feature walls still exist.

Looking from the kitchen to the family area.

Standing in what was the cage, looking at meals.

Looking at the kitchen from the laundry – above the sink was the kitchen window and skylight, along that half wall was a full wall and sliding door, where the bifolds are was the dark security mesh.

Standing in what was the cage, looking at what was the kitchen window, full wall, and then where the glass door was.

The bit we changed where the fridge should have been but wasn’t.

Lounge/Dining Room

Looking into the lounge room from the entry way

Looking at the loungeroom from the dining room

Master Bedroom

Bedroom with blinds in (will be plantation shutters one day) and aircon gone

Office

White cedar blinds in office. No more pelmets!

Guest/Spare Room

Yep, still have horrible feature walls. Patience, people! Pelmet gone, using cruddy roller blind from our bedroom in here for now. None of the wardrobes have any doors on them.

 Laundry

Temporary cupboards

GB’s Room

Still have horrible feature wall here too, but at least he has a place to house his stuff, and with blind and pelmet and horrid curtains gone and cedar blinds in, it’s fresh and light and OK for a 12 YO.

I took a glass of wine across the road last night and watched the sunset.

Until the mossies chased me home.

Have you met Noodles; Pie; Dumpling and Stew?

These girls are especially handy in the garden. Especially Stew.

Stew is into everything. She thinks she is a person disguised as chook.

When it’s time for planting, she is always front and centre to supervise.

She makes sure the holes are just the right depth

and that any plants will fit  perfectly.

This is called the head measurement test.

Dumpling doesn’t care much for for Stew, I can imagine here she is waiting for a landslide.

Once the plant has been approved of, and the human has placed it into the hole, it requires rigorous inspection. Of course Stew is in charge of quality control. As you can tell.

There’s another reason we call her Stew, you know.

It’s short for stupid.

One day, her head is going to get too close to this shovel, right on the downward swing.

Talk about running around like a headless chook.

So, my son along with 11 others, set off today at sparrow’s fart, to join 13,000  scouts from all over the globe at the AJ2010 Jamboree.

We were to be up and off at 5.30 AM ready to meet the bus, which transported them off to the airport to meet their flight to Sydney. Onto another bus to Cataract Park, where they spent the remainder of day setting up tents and getting ready to test their limits for the Summer of their Lives.

So you can imagine our dismay when on Thursday, said son awoke with a temp, high fever and cough. By Friday, his voice was going. This morning, gleeful green snot joined his daily headache. What can we do? Keep him home?  Hardly.

Daily doses of  extra F&V, early nights, honey and lemon and all things healthy. Nothing helped.

With a heaviness in my heart I put that sick kid on the bus this morning and joined 11 other local yours-in-scouting families in waving goodbye. A bit hard to have the ‘Summer of your Life’ if you are as sick as a dog.

Still.

A Jamboree is a big deal in the scouting world. It takes three years to prepare for a Jamboree.  It’s taken our troop 2 years of fund-raising topped off with personal savings to get these guys on the road and to the Jamboree. The lead up to the event has been huge.  The theme of the Jamboree is to challenge all attendees to “Test Your Limits”. It seeks to motivate everyone to test themselves to see just how capable and resilient they are. It makes for good fun, good growing up, good team-manship and good sports.  They sleep in (unpowered site) tents in sleeping bags. They cook, clean, wash and housekeep for themselves, their troop and their visitors. They are self sufficient and well supervised. They are expected to each pull their own weight and develop their role in a strong, community minded fashion, and form a village.

Which is really hard to do when you are as sick as a dog, have a headache and head full of jolly green snot.

Like a hundred (at least) other mothers, I have spent most of today glued to the Jamboree Facebook page waiting for news. Yes’m; Scouts are on Facebook – and twitter.  The general vibe is that the children are so busy learning leadership skills, working in teams, and really – having fun – that they are far too busy to think about home.

Except mine.  He has already rung home – twice – once with a suspiciously quavering sounding voice to ask me if  I would possibly  know where his torch is?*

Sorry sweetie, you are on your own now.   It’s awfully quiet here without you.

*Yes, I wanted to jump through the phone and bring him home.