big sigh

Our house is almost empty.
This morning, two men came and packed most of our belongings into boxes and took them away.
In order for them to be able to do that, we have spent a good part of the last 3 weeks going through all our stuff and deciding whether we wanted to keep it and, if we did, whether we needed to take it with us or could live without it for 3 months.
I am quite happy to say that we took 5 big garbage bags full of clothes and linens to a charity shop and that we have a massive pile of stuff that friends are going to take and use.

I have a bunch of things I want to do before we leave the UK next week, but right now, all I want to do is sit on the couch, listen to some music and knit. And that's just what I'll do.

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Uh, yeah

Sorry about that. I didn't mean to only post once in the whole of April. But, unless this blog is your only point of contact with me, you will know that life is very busy here, what with planning our big move back to Australia and all (so not ready for the movers to turn up in 3 weeks - they'll pack for us, but we have to have the place sorted enough that we can point out what to pack and what to leave). Anyway, because I am supposed to be sorting, packing, getting rid of stuff that's not coming, etc, I have, of course, spent the day doing things like writing blog posts and updating ravelry... oh, and playing with, feeding, changing, encouraging naptime to, a little being that seems to have suddenly turned into a toddler.

OK, more ravelry updating to do and then I should be back to show you some of the stuff I've been working on...

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Sunday Update

Oops, didn't mean to go a full 4 weeks without updating... Although, we haven't actually been at home on a Sunday since I last posted - last week we were in Switzerland, the week before in Belgium and the week before that we spent the whole day with friends who are headed back to the USA very soon.

And, there's plenty going on here, but lots of it I can't/won't write about on a publicly viewable website. In fact, I'm struggling to decide what I should say right now. Probably shouldn't have left this so late in the day to write. Here are some highlights of the last few weeks:

- Lily and I went along to a craft show and helped out on the Learn to Knit stand. OK, I helped teach some people to knit, Lily just acted all cute and drew in the crowd :) It was a great day and definitely something I would volunteer to do again. The rest of the craft show wasn't too exciting, although I did manage to spend a bit of money on some bits and pieces, including 10 skeins of Mirasol Hacho wool that was too big a bargain to pass up, even if it did break my rule of only buying yarn if I know what I am going to knit from it.

- Spring has sprung and we've been spending more time outdoors. Lily loves the swings at the local park. She also chats back at nature when the birds are singing or the wind is blowing. I've taken lots of photos of her surrounded by spring plants, especially daffodils - I love daffodils.

- As I said, we spent literally a full day with friends a few weeks ago. We met up at Church in the morning, grabbed some lunch to go, made our way to Kew Gardens where we picnicked then had a wander around, caught an over-crowded bus (there was rail trackwork, so replacement buses, and traffic jams) to Chiswick and had dinner all together. They go back to the USA soon, victims of this 'credit crunch' thing whose placement in the UK has been deemed too expensive.

- Lily has discovered the wonders of animals. She patted a dog in the park last week and today we took her to Kew where they have a petting farm over the Easter holidays. Photos will (should) be on her website soon.

- There's a massive post over at our website about our trip to Switzerland last weekend. If you really need more to read, go there.

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sunday update

This week was all about the babies. OK, so most every day for me is all about the baby, but we spent a lot of time with other babies (and toddlers) as well.

Tuesday and Thursday both saw us checking out a local playgroup - well, I would call it a playgroup, but here they seem to use that term for what I would call pre-school... Anyway, this place is basically an open-house in a church basement for parents/carers and their under-5s, although there didn't seem to be many kids over 3 - probably because they send them off to school at that age here. They have a cafe, a bunch of play equipment, a separate area for the non-walkers to play in without getting trampled, plus a second-hand shop. Apparently there are also other activities in some of the separated rooms, but I wasn't able to get clear information on them. The best way to sum up my experience of it so far is that it's one of those things that's a really great idea, but doesn't quite live up to potential. But hey, Lily had heaps of fun playing with the other babies and some different toys and I got to chat to some other mums, so it's a perfectly worthwhile way to spend one morning a week (we went twice this week because I was told that there was different stuff on on the different days - either that was misinformation, or [more likely] there just wasn't any indication of what different stuff was happening).

Afterwards on Tuesday, we went to Westfield to have lunch and do some shopping. I don't think I've mentioned how excited I was when Westfield opened. It's not even about the shopping. It's all about the familiarity of not just the Westfield brand, but the big open layout, the decent toilet/babychange facilities, the presence of a food court - it's like the shopping centres I'm used to back home, which is not at all common here. On Tuesday, we probably spent about 3 hours there and all I bought was lunch, though I did make some notes about possible gifts for Lily's first birthday...

On Friday, after our usual library visit and snack with friends, we went to one of the posher local high streets, to seek out something in the art supply shops and also to scour the charity shops - if you're going to look in second-hand shops, I always recommend the most affluent bit of town, because that's where you find the quality stuff, although I didn't get anything this time. We did buy some cheap books from the discount bookstore though and I was thrilled when we got home and Lily just wanted to play with and look at her new books and not eat them.

Yesterday, Lily got her first pair of proper shoes, as in shoes that have soles suitable for walking on (but soft ones, since her little feet are still working out their place in the world). Unsurprisingly, they were fairly huge for her age and we had to go up half a size in length in order to get ones that were wide enough for her giant wide, pudgy feet - as in, the H width still wasn't quite wide enough in size 4, so we went up to a 4.5H. There are no cheap shoes in Lily's foreseeable future, since they just don't make them wide enough. Again, this doesn't really come as a surprise - my feet are still too long and wide to buy many brands of shoes. Or, more accurately, non-brands... it's the brand-name ones that tend to actually come in suitable sizes and therefore cost the money. Oh well, 'quality over quantity' seems to be becoming a stronger mantra for me every day.

Today, we had a small insight into why we are so tired - not only have we all had a cold, which makes breathing and therefore sleeping quite tricky for the smallest member of our family, in turn making sleeping a luxury for us, but we discovered this afternoon that she's broken another tooth.

On the crafty front, I am almost finished a knitted dress for Lily, am about a third of the way through a crocheted pram blanket (for which I bought the yarn before she was even born, but which I kept starting a pattern and then changing my mind) and am completely stalled on my February Lady sweater (a cardigan for me) because I have got to the end of the yoke and am somehow a stitch short and can't decide where or how I want to fix it (especially since I can't work out where or how it happened). The biggest problem is that no matter how many great toys Lily has, as soon as I pull something out to work on, that becomes the most interesting thing in the room (books, computers and tv remotes included) so I am finding it very difficult to accomplish much of anything.

Seems Lily has woken up for a feed and it won't be Sunday much longer... so, how was your week?

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Sunday (came and went) Update

Gee, what did I even do last week???

Actually, not a lot.

Friday we went to the library as usual. Lily was determined to be centre stage and steal everyone's attention by bouncing, chatting and giggling - the fact that she's already adorable anyway and had her hair in pigtails probably explains the number of compliments she got. I had a very strange conversation with a woman who seemed convinced that I would never be able to wean Lily because I didn't stop breastfeeding her as soon as she was 6 months old... politely disagreed with her, but couldn't convince her that it would be ok... had a good laugh about it later, once I got over the initial 'what the?'.
We then went and hung out at one of our friend's houses and ended up staying there all day, joined later by Graeme for dinner. It was a really great day but definitely highlighted for me one of the problems with this whole 'move overseas for a few years' thing - when we left Australia, it was hard to say goodbye to our family and friends, even though we knew we'd be back - how hard then will it be to say goodbye when we leave here, without plans to ever return? I guess I've always had that fear at the back of my mind and it might be why we haven't been as social as we usually are... I don't really know where I'm going with this train of thought, but I'm going to leave it out there.

Saturday we went to Kew and had a picnic lunch. The spring flowers are starting to bloom and it's really nice - we'll definitely be making the most of our membership over the next couple months.



Really, that's about all we got up to. I've actually done more already this week but I'll save that for my next update, since I have other things I need to do right now, in that precious time between Lily's bedtime and my own.

Question (prompted by the weird conversation I mentioned): If you breastfed (especially past 6 months) how did you respond to people who thought you were weird? Is it too rude to tell them I think they're the weird ones?

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Baby Surprise Jacket

This is one of those famous knitting projects that has been made and blogged about thousands of times. It's a little jacket that is knit all in one piece. When you first finish, it looks like this:

Then you fold it once...

...and fold it again...

... sew two seams (and weave in the ends - my least favourite part) and you have an adorable little jacket, which is even more adorable when modelled by Lily.

This was a pretty easy knit once you get into it and I love that the pattern has you knit in some butt ease, so it fits nicely over Lily's cloth nappies.
Ravelry details here

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(yesterday was) Sunday Update

I didn't get around to writing this yesterday and almost missed writing it today as well. I've had one of those weeks where you feel like you never stop, but then you look back and can't quite work out what you achieved...

We all caught a minor bug early last week - nothing major, but it was enough to keep Graeme home for a day and Lily and I housebound for a couple more. Kind of felt like the flu, but like a really wussy strain of it that was pretty easily defeated.

We went for a trip to Kingston-on-Thames on Saturday (there's good shopping and nice restaurants there) and had planned to stop off at Kew on the way home, but there was something crazy and infuriating going on with the buses and it took a ridiculous amount of time to get between Kingston and Kew, so we decided to keep going home.

We missed church on Sunday because we suddenly realised at 10.05 that it was, in fact, 10.05am and there was no way we were ready enough to get sorted, out the door and to the church anywhere near to on time (10.30). It was nice to spend the whole day at home and we were actually quite productive - got some cleaning and other unexciting but necessary house things done.

I finally finished one of my many projects that had been sitting, almost finished, for a while. But that's another post (hopefully tomorrow - I need to head to bed soon, to be sure I get enough sleep before Lily decides to wake up, since that's been very unpredictable lately).

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Lily's a Superstar

I've written up my first couple of reviews for Frugi. The kimono bodies are something that we finally bought when we realised that even the 12 months size bodysuits we had were getting tight on Lily - she's in the 6-12 months of these and still has plenty of growing room.

The romper (that's the link you want to see Lily) was something that I thought was adorable, but may not have bought myself. It was sent to us to review and has me wondering if we should get more rompers.

Yeah, if you follow Lily's blog and/or are friends with me on facebook (add me if we're not - search for my kateandgraeme email address) you've probably already seen these photos, but I don't care :)

I know, I owe you some better updates than that - it's almost the weekend so I should get a chance to have more than 5 minutes sans-baby.

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