This is going to be a loooong one! Mostly photo’s though, so you won’t need your bifocals.
I haven’t updated for a while, and that’s mostly because it has been school holidays for the last two weeks (thankfully they are over and the girls have gone back to school today 
), and we’ve been away for one week of them, and just busy doing ’stuff’ for the other week.
The first week, which was just before Easter, we went down to the 90 Mile Beach, to a spot called Paradise Beach. My parents have some land there with a little shack on it, and we have been going there at Easter for a couple of years now. I think sometimes when I say it is a shack, people think I mean shack in the ’lovely summer home by the beach but I don’t want it to sound like we’re rich’ way. I wish. Nope. It actually is a shack. My dad made it a few years ago out of left over building supplies and windows - it’s big enough to fit a double bed bunk, portapotty in the corner, table and chairs and some shelving on one end that acts as a kitchen/linen area. So, we are quite snug, but usually set up another little tent outside to put the portapotty into (ugh imagine doing your business in the corner of the shack while the other’s play scrabble and read!). We take down our camping bunks, and we’re set! No running water, or tank water, we have to take all our own - the nice man next door lets us plug our extension lead into his shed so we do have electricity.
You get the picture, it’s quite basic. BUT this is why I love it down there. It was school holidays, and this was the beach…
Looking towards Melbourne…
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Looking towards Lakes Entrance…
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If you REALLY try you can probably make out the silhouette’s of a couple of fishermen waaaaay up the other end of the sand. On Good Friday a load of people arrived to camp by the foreshore between Paradise Beach and Seaspray 30km away, but still, they started about a kilometre from us, and there was like twenty people on the beach even then - awesome.
We went pippying (my legs are still sore from all the bending over), because the kids love to eat them raw on the beach. The girls took about 30 seconds to get naked most days, and paddled around pretending to be mermaids…
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While the MEN went fishing…
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Which actually paid off, because David caught two flathead, a salmon, and a huge tailor, which is in this photo with Amy…
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All the fish got cooked on the barbeque in foil with butter, and it was so delicious eating it straight from the foil, the kids loved it.
Every night we sat around the coals of the BBQ and David toasted marshmellows for the kids. They thought they were in heaven!!
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We came back Easter Saturday, to avoid the traffic, so were back in plenty of time for the Easter bunny to find us - Humpty Dumpty’s all round! The bunny had also hidden some eggs around the front garden, so there was a bit of a free-for-all as the kids charged around trying to find as many as they could.
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This one took a bit of finding, tricky old bunny.
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The next exciting news was that Kelsey’s lost her first tooth! I managed to get this action shot about a second after she yanked it out - can you tell she’s excited? And the next shot is her admiring her new ‘mature’ smile in the bathroom mirror.
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Amy finally mastered riding her bike with no training wheels, and is so totally rapt with herself, it’s nice to see her zooming around looking so proud - we don’t really have a big flat area for her to have practiced much, but we take all the bikes down to the little ath’s track sometimes, so they can get a really good go.
I took the kids down to visit their Great Nana and Great Grumpa last week, it’s been a while since I’ve been, and I also organised for my cousin’s wife to meet me there so the kids could play while we chatted to Nana and Grumpa. I had only met her eldest daughter when she was a baby, and it’s a shame they live so far away, as all of theirs are pretty much the same age and definitely the same sex as ours - they had a fantastic time getting to know one another, and played really well together.
Saturday night saw us out at a friends daughter’s 4th birthday party at a local pub that has a playroom (hooray to whoever thought up that idea!). The adults ate and chatted, while the kids ran amok in the playroom, so it was a really good night. Not even Quinn sitting on the birthday cake put a dampener on things. (Thank goodness it was a mud cake, a cream sponge would not have held up so well to the challenge I think!)
There was a trip to IKEA in there as well, got there in time for the $2 breakfast which was yummy. We had vietnamese spring rolls at a tiny place called Thy Thy in Victoria St in Richmond, visited the brand new adventure playground they’ve made in Gisborne, and I even got some time to start some swaps for the Stampin’ Up! convention in May. Most of the other time was spent doing umpteen billion loads of washing after the camping trip, but it was a great holiday really!
Apart from that, of course the new 2007-2008 Idea Book & Catalogue came out on 1st April, but that’s going to have to have it’s very own post!
