It’s funny you know, because I stress out about them coping – especially with a last minute new teacher and their teacher from last year disappearing. I worry about them being at home for so long and going straight back into school work and how they’ll react behaviour-wise.

But my kids are just so adaptable. They didn’t bat an eyelid at having a new teacher. They’ve thrown themselves right into their school work without a hitch. Mummy just worries about a whole lot of nothing!!

Jayden is already bringing home chapter books for homework and reading a whole book in one sitting. He couldn’t read this time last year and now it just blows me away – the words he can read. He is always asking me to go to the library, little bookworm, just like his mama.

No homework for Bailey yet but he is keen to learn to read too, it won’t be long before he is bringing books home to read to us.

Swimming lessons start up next week for two weeks. two whole weeks of tired kids after school – AND two weeks of washing towels and bathers. Fun. I wonder if I can sneak down to the pool to watch them, I love seeing them learning new things.

Hubby and I made a trip down to the hardware this morning – Jye was excited and toddled around picking up all sorts of things, definitely a real blokey bloke that one! We picked up some paint for the room I’m doing for the organising challenge. I also got some more paint to repaint their chest of drawers, the paint on it now is a little girly and it’s not going to match the theme of the room at all.

Ikea are sending out the square shelves I wanted. The boys have a white one on their current bedroom wall, but I’ll leave it there for the babies and we have a black one coming for their new room. We also have a bunk bed frame on it’s way.

Now all I have to do is tackle the mount’o'washing and we’ll be able to move the rest of the gear out and start painting! Yippee! It’s going to be a fun task with two toddlers running about.

Oh and I have some Ben 10 wall stickers on the way that hubby doesn’t know about. Shhh! I also got baby zoo animals for the little boys room and Tinkerbell for the girls room.

I still have to get some baskets to go in the shelves when I go to Perth next, and some Ben 10 quilt covers, and I need to work out what to do with the door at the back…perhaps some Ben 10 fabric that I can turn into a curtain.

A mere few hours later and the phone rings. It’s a friend of my good friend Karin who works in a nearby town, they had come in once for dinner on Karin’s birthday.

I should mention that we’re not just a pub, we also have accommodation here – 3 en-suite rooms and 5 donga style rooms(these are common on mine sites, just a small room with a bed and communal showers/toilet).

Anyhow friend of Karin’s said they’d like to book out our accommodation, the whole 8 rooms, for THREE MONTHS. You wouldn’t believe the happy dancing that followed, actually don’t even try to picture a enormous pregnant woman attempting to happy dance. If you did, well you just pictured me.

I’ve just done the sums and from the accommodation alone, they’ve just wiped out 2/3rds of our debt! Yes, you read that right!

We’ll have to add in breakfast, lunches and dinners for 8 people and I’m sure that there will be plenty of beer going out over the bar – nothing like a cold beer after a hard days work!

See, all I had to do was have some faith and I really had nothing to worry about right? Now just as long as nothing else major goes wrong we’ll be ok. We’ve spent over $3000 getting the air conditioner fixed and another $700 on a new dishwasher.

I do have office administration skills, but there aren’t so many offices out in the bush – plus who would hire a 6 1/2 month pregnant woman anyway? In this day and age though, there are plenty of work at home jobs using those skills, so I have already applied for half a dozen jobs. Let’s just hope something comes of it!

In the meantime, it’s time to tighten the purse strings – no more buying pink clothes for bub just because they’re ’so cute’. She already has PLENTY of clothes.

I’ll also put the babies back into cloth nappies full time because disposables are just too expensive. We do alot of washing and have 2 washing machines so I’ll make sure that the grey water is going onto the back lawn so we don’t have to water it.

We’ll shower together to save water(we don’t have a bath here) – I don’t think hubby would object to that one! LOL. We already shower with the babies because it’s just easier, plus they can open the bathroom door and they get into the shower with us whether we want them to or not. The big boys shower nightly together.

And remember the saying, ‘If it’s yellow – let it mellow; if it’s brown – flush it down’. Yeah, no explanation needed.

Go back to once a month cooking, I saved a lot of money when I use to do it. I have a big enough kitchen now too.

Plan trips in the car to get as much done as possible. Plan what I need to buy and stick to it.

Turn the lights off in the bar if there is no customers. Same goes for our living areas, if no-one’s in the room turn things OFF.

I’m sure there’s more that I can do, but that’s some of the main things that we probably waste too much money on.

At least my kids are content with what they have! They don’t need a million and one toys, they are quite happy with a bucket and spade and a big patch of dirt in the backyard(and if they can get their hands on some water, even better!). The toddlers are happily playing with a calculator and empty tissue boxes – even though it’s resulted in a few fights and an almost 14 months old with a black eye. But they are happy and it just goes to show that money doesn’t bring happiness(but it does put food on the table). Oh to be a child again and not have to worry!

I’d always imagined myself with a big family. 4 kids – at least. But I didn’t imagine a big family with only one gender. Boys are foreign creatures to me, I grew up as an only child and my dad was rarely around due to his work schedule, I didn’t have much to do with boys when I was younger and I found it hard being around boys when I was older. But my whole relationships with boys/men is a whole different story.

I had my first baby, a boy. I didn’t care, I was a MUM! Second pregnancy, another boy – no worries, I still had at least two more babies. I split from my ex and started dating my now husband who insisted he didn’t want any more children – that was hard for me. Then he had a change of heart and agreed, one baby together.

It was another boy, I was happy for my husband – he had a daughter and really wanted a son of his own(he still loves my boys like his own, it’s more the carrying on the family name thingo). I was sad though when I found out at my ultrasound that he was another boy. Sad because I felt like that was my last chance and I never got to have the daughter that I’d always longed for. Of course I fell in love with him the instant I had him and he is a darling wee boy.

We got married and fell pregnant on our honeymoon. I got my hopes up, I mean 3 boys, surely a girl was next up. We had the Nuchal Translucency scan at 13 weeks and my risks of a baby with Downs Syndrome was one in five. It was a very difficult time and we opted for the amnio at 16 weeks where we found out he was perfectly healthy and that he was in fact another he. I cried. For days. And I felt horribly guilty because after all the stress my baby was healthy, but it was another BOY. We were pretty sure we were done having babies by now and I was devastated that I would never, ever get to have a daughter of my own.

It was hard at the time to admit my feelings. I was told I should be thankful that I can have children, that my boys are healthy. Of course I am thankful and I love each and every one of my boys.

Never did I feel any resentment to my baby, it was more of a feeling of the lost opportunities that come with a daughter if that makes sense. I would never get to be the mother of the bride, or be with my daughter through her own pregnancy and birth of her children. I’d never get to do the piggy tails and girly shopping trips and watch my own little girl grow up to be a beautiful woman.

Boys are LOTS of fun though and they are very loving to their mums(it warms my heart everytime hubby sees his mum and he gives her a hug). But after so many of them, I think it’s only natural to long for a girl. You know, if I had had 4 girls, I’d probably yearn for a boy.

I was terrified when I found out I was pregnant again. So was hubby – but for other reasons! I was convinced I would have a boy. I didn’t even get my hopes up even though hubby insisted it was a girl. I was so anxious on the trip to the hospital for my ultrasound at 18 weeks, thankfully a wonderful friend came with me on the 3 hour drive there. I lay on the table for ages, I had a trainee technician. I almost couldn’t look when they checked between the legs and lo and behold, 3 LINES. No little doodle! I think I was in shock for days afterwards, I bought lots of pink, but I don’t think I will believe it until I see my baby in the flesh.

Anyway, what I’m saying is don’t judge women who admit they were disappointed when they found out their baby was a particular sex. You can bet your bottom dollar that she loves that baby as much as she would if she had gotten the sex she wanted. Gender disappointment is more about mourning for the baby that you didn’t have and it has nothing to do with the baby that you got.

Not just that, but by participating in the challenge at I’m an Organizing Junkie, it means that I’ll in the running to win some prizes too! So I urge you all to check it out and join the challenge yourself!

So my room is going to be the very last bedroom in the pub. We have a long hallway that all our bedrooms run off of down one size. At this stage, hubby and I are in the first bedroom as it has a door that leads outdoors. In the next room are the little boys, they still wake at night every so often and I like to have them close so I can hear them. Room 3 is the big boys bedroom and then the last room is where my stepdaughter sleeps when she is here on school holidays and is also our ‘junk room’. You have to understand we downgraded from a 4 bed, 2 bath home to a lounge room, an office, a hallway with 4 bedrooms and a bathroom & toilet down the end.

Here are my scary, embarrassing before pictures. I can’t even get the door open all the way because we’ve thrown so much junk in there after my stepdaughter left last week that needs to be sorted.

What are we going to do with the room? Paint it, put bunk beds in, storage for toys and who knows what else. But in 28 days I want this room to look amazing! One thing I absolutely hate is the lack of windows. The door at the back of the room(and this is the same in the three bedrooms) use to open to the outside and have glass to let light in, however at some stage they’ve added a storeroom at the back of it, blocking out all the light. Hopefully we can make it look a little brighter.

At this stage our 3 en-suited accommodation rooms have been booked out for two weeks by a company that’s doing some work in the area. I’m not sure what they do, but I do know they collect old wooden railway sleepers(and we’ve asked if they could accidentally dump half a dozen in our back yard so we can make our garden bed hehe). So it’s all systems go with keeping their rooms clean, breakfast, lunch and dinner – not to mention plenty of cold beer for knock off time.

On top of that, I’ve been trying to rearrange our ‘house’. Getting the end room that is our spare/Matt’s daughters room cleaned out and done up so the big boys can move in there. Moving cabinets so I can finally unpack all my scrapbooking gear and USE it.

There’s also got to be time to play with the kids and do all sorts of things that they won’t be able to do once they go back to school on Monday. I swear my kids are weird – they simply cannot wait to get back through those gates! I hope the love of school will stick with them – probably not, especially when they get to the age when they cease to be early risers and we have to fight them to get out of bed!!!

Then Valentine’s day needs to be planned and organised(not at the last minute like I’m known for).

Bailey’s birthday is rapidly approaching. it’s all about Ben 10 this year(so it’s a Ben 10 bike that he’s getting).

I honestly don’t know how it can be 9.30pm and I’m still awake. It’s just an endless stream of doing things.

And people reckon that Stay At Home Mums have it easy? I’d like them to live a day in my shoes!!

So I had my booking visit at the hospital today, which is required by the midwifery program so that if anything should go wrong on my homebirth journey, I will be able to go to my ‘back up’ hospital. No worries I thought and off I went to my appointment.

WELL. Apparently I’m more than likely in their ‘high risk’ basket. Why you ask?

This is my 5th pregnancy, that means that I will probably bleed to death after I give birth.

My BMI is 32. If I get to 35, they won’t even allow me to birth at the hospital because being fat means you can’t birth naturally.

I’ve had 3 babies that were 9lb or bigger. Apparently women don’t just happen to grow big babies.

If I didn’t know any better, I would probably be terrified now and I would probably go and sign up for a c-section.

But I DO know better. I DO grow large babies and it doesn’t mean I have gestational diabetes. I have been overweight with ALL of my pregnancies and have not had any complications. Just because I’ve had 4 pregnancies already doesn’t mean I will bleed to death, because my body will be allowed to do what nature intended and not be injected with drugs and have the cord yanked on to get the placenta out ASAP.

It’s funny because my midwife isn’t concerned about any of the above, to be on the midwifery program you need to be LOW RISK and I managed to get a place no problem.

Shit it annoys me, I was being bullied at the hospital for my birth choices. I feel for the poor women who don’t know any better and allow themselves to be pushed around. I was one of them and almost ended up having a c-section from their interference!

*sigh*

We get to the pool and the water is COLD! I think it bothered the adults more than the kids. And because it’s half our luck, it started to RAIN. Luckily the kiddy pools were undercover(not that it mattered if they had gotten wet from the rain). I’m a bit bummed actually to see them enjoying themselves so much and they should have had a whole summer of fun like that. We’ve been a bit down with the whole au pair passing away and then the chicken pox, so all round, this summer holidays is one to be forgotten I think.

Anyhow, they had a great time today and I’m glad to hear them shouting and laughing – how I miss being a kid(and it’s not the same pretending to be a kid when playing with the kids!).

And here are my precious babies:

Jye chowing down on a mini cupcake.

The babies and I in the ‘babies’ pool.

AAAAH-CHOoooooooooooo!

Jayden swimming

Bailey

My stepdaughter, Charli and Bailey. Hopping out because it was cold.

I’m off for a long 4 hour drive to Perth tomorrow for 3 reasons. Firstly to take my stepdaughter to Perth(although her mother hasn’t bothered to let us know if she has organised to get her home from Perth as she lived 2 hours south of the city). I also have an appointment with my gorgeous midwife(YAY!) and then I also have a antenatal appointment at the hospital. Before you ask, no I’m not having a hospital birth, I’m booking into the hospital as my backup so that IF anything should go wrong – I’ll be able to birth at that hospital.

Then it’s the 4 hour trek home and throwing myself into Australia Day organisation! I won’t be blogging again until Monday night(so my meal plan Monday will be late), so until then, take care!

We all know how important it is to start cutting down on carbon emissions, not just for our own sake but for future generations too. This website guides you through what you can do to make a difference. You can choose the things you’re going to do over the year and you can track it to make sure you’re on target. The aim is for each member to cut down on 1 tonne of emissions in a year.

It seems simple enough and it IS easy to do! You’ll be surprised at how many things you probably already do.

It’s free to join, so there’s no excuse, stop reading my blog and go and sign up:
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I was determined to get things going with my two year old Owen. I swore black and blue that as soon as the weather warmed up, it was all systems go. Well, then I got pregnant and had 24/7 morning sickness and it all went down the tube. We’ve had days of letting him go nappy free and we go through about 20 pairs of underwear a day. We’ve tried letting him go completely naked, only for him to poop in the hallway(not ideal when you have a 13 months old toddling around!).

Well tonight the hubby decided to clean the bathroom and toilet, so he left the potty out in the hallway. Owen, who was doing the whole nudey run after a shower gig, sat on the potty and talked to Daddy(about who knows what). All of a sudden he hops up, with potty in hand and announces ‘My done wee wee in tha potty!’. SUCCESS!! He brings over his potty to show me, hubby having a panic attack at the idea of his pee sloshing around on his clean floor.

There was much praise and excitement. As a reward I gave him….a Tim Tam. Oops. I had to give him something and it was all I had onhand that was a ‘treat’ so to speak. I guess I will have to go to the store now and get something more suitable(smarties perhaps?) and see if we can get a few more wees tomorrow. I love how chuffed he was with himself and I am keen to get him out of nappies soon!