Snack Time!!!

It was time for a morning snack and I made a platter of snacks for all the kids to share and it's always the one you least expect..... Charlotte was glued to the plate and couldn't seem to get close enough! I'm surprised she let the others share!

Fun in the sun!

Here we all are enjoying some relief from the sun. Over the last 2 weeks we have had temperatures hovering around 37 degrees celcius (98F) to peaking last week at 42C (109F) for 3 days in a row. As you can imagine this has been a nightmare for us both and all the children home for the holidays. Well we decided to make use of Brooklyn's pool from her birthday and all piled over to Nanny Sue's house for a swim. Mum and Dad had installed 9000 litres worth of rain water tanks in 2 tanks last month so now was the time to test them out.
We are on tight water restrictions here in Victoria as our water levels reach 35% capacity. You cannot fill pools, spas, wash cars, water grass or concrete and you can only water 1 day a week between 5am and 8am. Strict hey?! HOWEVER!!!! If you are using tank water and have displayed a sign on your front fence stating Tank water in use then YOU CAN GO FOR YOUR LIFE! And that's just what we did.!!!!
Brooklyn and Jacob both enjoyed helping Nanny water her garden with tank water connected to the tap. Cooling themselves down in the process.

Now I know that these photos are dark but we set up a pool in the yard and covered it with a shade tent because we would have been burnt to a crisp in 5 minutes.
Somehow Charlotte ended up naked in the pool and was possesive of that bucket!


Don't you love a sunburnt country! Sometimes snow would be nice! Don't know which is worse! Enjoy your Christmas break, we are certainly enjoying our summer break! School starts again in 2 more weeks.

Harvest Time!

Have a look at this! Jason has begun to harvest the produce from his garden and everything was soo full of colour and plump in size. Even our cherry tomatoes were a bit on the large size (not pictured). This is by no means all that he collected because I told him to stop until we had organised this lot.
Here Jason and I are enjoying some harvest preperations for bottling. I was lucky enough to receive an electric bottling kit for christmas and it was about to be tested out with this fantastic recipe for tomato herb sauce. These days this kit is filled with water, plugged into the wall and left to boil for 1 hour. The tap on the container is then used to drain the water and your job is done. Makes bottling much more appealing I think, since I've never really been a fan!
I have come to appreciate to hard work that goes into producing home goods. I bet the pioneer women (when they were not forced from their homes) spent their lives in the kitchen cooking, bottling, harvesting and preparing meals. I don't know how they did it. This whole process to make 5 bottles of pasta sauce took 5 hours, 9 kilo's of tomatos and an hour to boil. I thouroughly enjoyed the experience and am planning the next shift when Jason has a spare weekend to devote with me!
Taaddaaaa!!!!!!! Aren't we clever!

Our New Year Pictures....

I wanted to get a couple of nice pictures of the kids after christmas so we could update our wall pictures. Before church one morning we headed out to the front yard and used my roses as a backdrop, (they're doing really well at the moment!). I think they came out really well. I took them to Kmart and had them enlarged and they are all nicely framed in the loungroom now!