Our First Party

We had a small little celebration after Matilda's baptism a couple of weeks ago. I love an excuse to get dressed up, decorate and make pretty food.


Matilda wore her cardi, bonnet and booties knitted by my great grandma and a little white linen dress that was a gift from my friend in England.



I made the tissue paper decorations from Martha Stewart, these were fun and I love how they looked, I think I'll be needing to make them for another party some time.


We had a yellow and white colour scheme going on, nice and summery.



Can't wait for her first birthday party!

Our new house

Where we are going to live has been a dilemma keeping us busy over the past 6 weeks. In the end it turned out that the house we wanted to build was out of our budget and it was all getting too hard so in the end we decided to sell our block of land and look for a house to buy.

So with that decision made we started looking around at houses on the market and we found one straight away that we liked. Right at the top end of our budget, but we liked it. We put in an offer with the real estate agent subject to the sale of our land and went under contract. We figured it made sense to list our land with the same agent, so we did that and it was all happening. After much dropping of our land price and paying legal fees and for pest inspections on the house we didn't end up selling our land in time so the contract expired. By this stage we were also really unhappy with the service we were getting from our real estate agent and so we were going to wait until our contract to sell our land expired and then re-list with someone else.

At that point we stumbled across a cute little house for sale that was quite a fair bit cheaper than the original house we'd offered on so we went to the open for inspection expecting something to be wrong with the house because it was so cheap. Turns out though that this was the perfect house for us and since it meant we could sell our block of land cheaper we thought we'd have a better chance of getting it. So we went through the whole process again, and spoke to our dodgy real estate agents (who we will never use again) who found a buyer for our block of land at a much cheaper price and well, we're moving into a house of our very own in 25 days time! I can't tell you how excited I am about it.

Our little back yard (with cubby and sandpit staying for Matilda)


I didn't want to post about it until I knew for sure it was going to happen... the sale on our block of land is now unconditional and our mortgage is all approved on the house so I'm about as certain as you can be now.


The best bit is we'll be in by Christmas time, Matilda will have her own room (no more baby corner), the house backs onto a little piece of farmland with a horsey on it, it's only 20 minutes from Brisbane city and the house has little pitched ceilings in the bedrooms which are too cute and remind me of Anne of Green Gable's bedroom (which I was always in love with when I was a kid). Ok so that's more than one best bit but I am so happy with this house and I can't believe it's actually going to happen this time.

We're still alive and kicking

I can't believe almost 2 months has past since my last post, it feels like it was about a week ago. I don't know where time goes with a bub but we have been busy.

She can even roll now (tummy to back anyway... )


We've had lots going on with Matilda, we had a few worries because she wasn't putting on enough weight but we've moved on to formula and she's doing well again now. She's still little - on the 25th percentile - but steady now at least, and someone has to be below average! I can't believe we ended up with her on formula, she fed so easily.. straight away from birth and in the end it turns out I didn't have enough for her. That explained why she was feeding every couple of hours and for so long at a time. When we first found out we had to put her on formula I was upset about weaning her but now that we're a few weeks in I'm ok with it. She's actually been a fair bit more settled as well as her weight sorting itself out so we're all happy campers and I have actually found it's made getting us organised and into a bit of a routine easier. She still chucks up like a trooper, but that doesn't seem to have much of an effect on her.. the nurse at the child health clinic told me that they call babies like her happy chuckers.. nice.

It's also been a struggle to get her to have some decent naps during the day time. But we are getting there slowly and that means every now and then I've started to get a bit more time with two hands free which seems like an incredible luxury. The last 2 nights she's even slept through from midnight until about 6am but I don't want to jinx that by saying we may have started something.

She's meant to be having her afternoon nap here, but every time I checked her I got this cheeky grin. Naughty.


Not to say that all of this means we haven't been having fun though. Every day now she becomes more interactive and fun to play with, and she's so cheeky! She loves singing and watching tv... particularly the wiggles, although I'm not happy to admit it. She also loves being outside and instantly settles when we take her out.

Enthralled with the Wiggles...


Hanging out at Southbank...


Checking herself out in her mirror...

Pre-baby parts of life are starting to become a reality again also - I'm working at the cafe one day a week. Matilda comes with me and we have a port-a-cot set up in the office for her to sleep in, or she hangs out in the baby bjorn while we serve customers. We've also started doing some baking again and we've even had a catering job (luckily this was on a Saturday so Matty got to hang out with her Dad for the day).



Then there's been developments on the house and we had a sweet little party for Matilda's baptism so there are lots more posts and photos to come. I must admit too that I haven't posted for awhile because I've felt guilty about not doing an update about the baby shower swap (and not having my gift ready to post) but I have seen a few posts around the place of people's gifts they've sent and received and I've finally got mine ready to go so I'll have to post an update for that too. Apologies too for all the emails/comments I haven't replied to.. I'm getting there, slowly but surely, bear with me :)