Pistol.

This just about sums up Lily all week.  If only this blog came with sound…    

  And then 5 minutes later she has to go and be all cute and silly and stuff… 

   
And then 10 minutes later, she crashes…

Chain.

I come from a family of paper chains.  We made paper chains for everything when I was growing up.  Somehow, however, Emily has never actually made a paper chain herself.  Oh Lordy.  This story is a doozy.  So she has a great idea to have her and Lily make a paper chain – pink to show the number of days until Hamilton Island, and then blue to show the number of days that we are in this house after we get home from Hamilton – but not the number of days until we actually leave Australia, which is slightly confusing but an interest in approach to paper chain construction.  So Em and Lily are cutting away, making the strips.  And then Em starts taping them into rings.  And then they have to go run off to whatever fun activity they had planned for that day.  Em’s brain thought, “hmmmm, so how do I actually connect the circles that I just taped together?”  When she got home, she realized that she wasn’t supposed to tape the rings unless there was another ring inside it…  Right.  Got that problem solved.  Cut the rings.  Pink.  Blue.  Pink.  Blue.  OH CRAP!  She wanted to do all pink first, and THEN all blue.  Cut the rings.  Start again.  12 hours later, here you have it folks!  Emily’s very first paper chain.  God I love this chica.  🙂 

 Mummyliscious.

This is the netball team that we played with on Monday nights.  Well, what was left of it.  We played our last Monday night game this week. 

 Wine.

Check out the next door neighbor’s wine rack.  Um.  Yes, please.  Do you think I will find a house in Des Moines that has one of these? 

 Marks Angels.

This is our Wednesday night netball team.  We were supposed to have one more game, but our opponents forfeited our last game – making us the champions.  I guess they were afraid to play us.  This has been such a fun group of ladies to play netball with.  I’m going to miss this!  Do you think there are any netball leagues in Des Moines? 

 Spaceship.

Ty made some stuff out of cardboard at school this week.  He had such fun at school that he couldn’t wait to make something else when he got home.  This is his spaceship.  He even had a seatbelt. 

 Sick.

Ty was the first one to complain of not feeling well this week – headache, which was weird because he hasn’t really ever complained of having a headache.  He stated home one day to rest.  A couple days later, I got it.  Not sure what “it” is, either a cold or allergies.  I am thinking allergies – runny nose, sneeze, watery eyes.  It has been about a week and we are still sniffly, but getting better. 

 
Toes.

When I was sick in bed, Lily sat on the bed with me.  For about 20 minutes, she sat there with cards in between her toes.  And then she saw dust floating in the air when the sunlight was just right, and she tried to catch the dust, singing “shoo fly don’t bother me”.  What a weirdo.  She must get it from her dad… 

   
Purge.

We had a lady come do an estimate of how much stuff we have to pack in our air shipment containers.  We are allotted two 4’x4’x4′ containers, which is about 188 cubic (or sq) feet.  When the lady calculated up how many boxes we would need, she said that we have 380 cu ft of things.  Um…..well that’s a bit of a problem.  So we spent the weekend moving everything that is going in the air shipment in the guest bedroom into a space that equals our container space.  It looks like we will just about fit.  But that still meant that we have to leave HEAPS of things behind.  We have accumulated a ton of stuff in 2 years.  We were going to have a garage sale, but our neighborhood isn’t great for garage sales.  As luck would have it, one of our netball teammates is moving to Brisbane and was going to have a garage sale.  She offered to let us out our stuff in her garage.  HUGE thank you to Kel.  HUGE.  Em and I sat there for a couple hours, then Kel sent us off to get more sorting and packing done.  This was our car when we went to Kel’s house.  We came home with only about half, which was awesome.   

 Miss Steph came over and took a bunch of stuff with her to use at the daycare.  And then we just started taking stuff into the office to either sell or give away free.  We are slowly but surely getting down to a pretty empty house.  The kids are doing well with the few toys we don’t have packed up, but are going to get antsy soon. 

Jay took a car load of our shelving units and the trampoline to the office for the people that bought them in the staff sale a while ago.  The old wagon can sure haul a lot of stuff! 

 Beach.

Jay took the kids to the beach Saturday morning while Em and I were garage saling.  They didn’t get to play long before the rain came. 

 SeaWorld.
While Kel was working hard selling our stuff on the second day of her garage sale, the kids were needing a little attention.  So we took them to SeaWorld because Lily had been asking to go for a while – “sea worl-ld”.  It was a nice little afternoon, penguins, Dolphins, sea lions, Dora, Diego, Ninja Turtles.  Happy kids.   

    
    
    
    
   
Gymnastics.

I worked from home one day this week.  I started early and finished late so that I could go watch Lily in her gymnastics lesson.  Em had been saying for quite a while that Lily is totally in her element at the gym.  She was right.  Lily was being a bit of a pistol, but she walked around that gym with so much confidence.  I love these upside down pictures – shows how happy she is.  Our little monkey. 

    
   
Legos.

Since we packed up most of the kids toys, Ty has been getting more creative with his Legos.  I love this Aussie tradie ute.   

 Chain.

I made a paper chain at the office to show how many full days I am at work. The chain is super short. Wowza.
GPM.

This week I spent a lot of time writing up my and my employees’ annual performance reviews.  I got a little choked up as I thought about everything that has happened in the last year.  I am SO proud of the team that I have had the pleasure of working with here.  Despite a lot of people doubting how we would manage through lots of change, staff turnover, and uncertainties, my team pulled together and have done great work this year.  I hadn’t prepared myself appropriately because in my first meeting with one of my employees, I got teary-eyed, and then it happened again with my other employee, and then again when I was sitting in my own performance review.  I have had lots of jobs, and I have been sad to leave most of them.  But this feels so different.  So permanent.  There is a good chance that I will not see many of these beautiful people ever again.  Some, yes, I will cross paths in the halls of corporate, and some I may see when we vacation in Australia.  But I will not see everyone that I have worked with for 2 years in the same place at the same time ever again.  Pretty sure I am going to be an emotional mess when I have to do the dreaded walk around the office for final goodbyes.  Ugh. 

Art.

Ty loves his after school art with Miss Betty.  He’s pretty good! 

   
Model.

Here is another awesome shot of my brother.  Such a little cowboy.  Love Diana Volk’s work – captures the spirit of the Wild West. 

 Update.

We are getting closer to having our Des Moines temporary rental home arranged.  Still haven’t found any of the 3 cars we need to buy.  Still stalking realtor.com and saving properties that we want to look at a couple days after we return to the US.  Job prospects are good for me (can’t talk about it yet but rest assured I am excited about the plan).  Temporary home in Australia is booked for the week that we don’t have furniture in our house – staying in a holiday home at Sanctuary Cove so that Em has some options to keep the kids entertained.  And we got our activities booked for our trip to Hamilton Island next week.  Looking forward to slowing down a bit on Hammo before the craziness begins.  I am surprisingly calm with everything, despite all of the unknowns and uncertainties.  I don’t know if you all know this about me, but I am a bit of a control freak.  There are a lot of things out of my control at the moment, but I am OK with that. For now…can’t guarantee I won’t freak out in the future.  🙂

Nanny cam.

It is starting to get hot.  Auntie Em took Lily to Wet-n-Wild one day.  I am pretty sure they will go back.  Lily is such a dare devil – she went down the water slide about 100 times.   They also went to a friend’s neighborhood pool.

    
    
    
    
    
 
This was a great end to a long week – just what I needed.  And yes, Lily is a goofball.