Two-Tone Day

When I was a child, I went through a stage of colouring in where I would trace the outline with a marker and then fill in the centre with the same coloured pencil. Yesterday reminded me of that - dark at the edges, with a lovely light centre (although writing it like that makes me think of a yummy biscuit, but anyway, it may be because I can smell apple crumble cooking from the kitchen...focus Cass, focus!).

The morning was crazy busy - Harriet had an early football game as well as team photos, so not only did she have to get to football, she couldn't have her hair still in yesterday's school loops (as she normally does) and she had to have matching socks (one went missing last week) and she wanted to eat a pancake for breakfast (which is the slowest breakfast in the world to make, and boy you should see her eat it...slllooooowwwwly). Plus Ted and I were heading to Jay's house in order to help out however we could before her open home at 10am.

Startlingly we made it to football just in time, and then it was on to Jay's house where I made the first of my awesome finds for the day - this cute little wooden chair opposite her house. I even reversed to make sure I had spied what I thought I had spied from behind a big old car blocking my view. Yay, free photo prop! This was the start of the light-filled centre after the issues with getting everyone out of the house in the morning.








Ted also thought he'd model it for me, albeit briefly. Very briefly. In fact I think he slid off that thing as I was taking this shot. So after I'd picked Jimbo and Harriet from football and some apparently atrocious photos (gotta love the eternally merciless critical eye of the photographer's partner), we went home to laze around the house doing nothing at all.

I managed to do that for all of about ten minutes before I decided to pop up to our local op shop to drop off some bags of baby books that were hanging around the lounge room clogging up my visual space.





And check out what I found! Unfortunately it wasn't free, it was $40 which was a lot to me. But I've been looking for a desk for the wall in the second bedroom for a while now and have been failing miserably. Everything is either too big or too boring or too expensive or too dark or just not right in some way. When I saw this set of drawers however, I knew it was time to release the dream of the desk for the magic of these drawers. Aren't they gorgeous? I am so in love with them, they really finish off the second bedroom and look deliciously old fashioned with our old 50s blanket on the bed for those chilly nights we've been having lately.



So I returned home and James valiantly agreed to take the drawers outside for a photo. In fact all I did was put on a slightly sweeter-than-normal voice, managed to ask, "Hey James...?" and his reply was "Where do you want to take the photo?". Naw, what a guy!

We spent the afternoon lying around in the afternoon sun in the playroom drinking chai, reading the paper and stewing apples for some delicious apple crumble (remember that first paragraph?). Ted continued his latest obssession with climbing over anything that sits in one place at one time and after crawling under his cubby (see top photo) he decided it was much more interesting to climb over it again and again and again.

But then, something...something turned. And all of a sudden we were trying to calm down a stressing out Harriet, Teddy starting yelling, and it was all downhill from there. I can't even remember quite what started it all. Anyway, that was the end of the light middle and the start of the dark end. Bummer.



This week we're going to Jay, Scott, Poe and Ilo's farewell party. Damn them all, they're going to follow their dreams in Bellingen, leaving us a hollow mess behind them. It's so hard when friends leave - you can try to drink them in as much as you can beforehand, but it's the constancy that you miss. The everyday phone calls about nothing much at all, the pop-ins and surprise afternoon playdates. When you catch up again it's all too easy to have conversations that ice skate over the top of everything that's really going on, because there is so much day-to-day details you've missed out on that to recount it all would take forever and hey, anyway, who wants to hear about the minutiae? Me! Me!


This sort of image is what we'll miss - the children playing happily in dirt bathed in the afternoon sun, searching for just the right rock to finish off their collection.















Of course Harriet has always got afternoon sun, mud, rocks and (usually) nudity covered in her own home most days. Even when it's freezing cold apparently.