A battle zone is what the garden is at the moment. Every day the kids and I spend some time in the front garden, making war with the roses. I do think that roses are lovely flowers, and I particularly like the ones that have a strong scent. I even like the look of rosehips in the garden after the flowers are long gone. However, I hate growing roses, and that might seem an odd statement given that there are at least 16 rose plants on our property (maybe even 20) and more on our common ground. I hate the black spot and aphid problems that they get before they even start flowering, but that is nothing compared to my hatred of pruning them.

I acquired seven rose plants when I purchased this house some 12 years ago. The tenant who lived here for 9 years more than tripled the number of roses in the garden. I have since given some to loving homes, and now that autumn is in full swing it is time to wage war with those that remain. I have scratches and splinters in my hands after my first pruning sessions. I try so hard to concentrate on not being spiked by those sharp prickles while part of my mind is trying to keep enough attention on the kids to see that they don’t run onto the road or do anything else dangerous. For the most part, the boys run around the garden, do loops from the front lawn, down the driveway, along the footpath and back up to the front lawn by using past a few rose bushes. Sometimes they get stuck on the prickliest of the roses as they push past them. Toby is obsessed with picking the remaining flowers and rose hips off the plants (and eating the rose hips), while Nathan just wants to cut things with either the secateurs or pruning saw.

I think it is going to take me a long time to prune the roses how I think they should be pruned (in contrast to how they have been pruned for the last 9 years), and there are a lot more scratches and splinters in store for me. Then again, I do have a gardening fork or two in the shed…..though some of the bushes are so fierce that I probably couldn’t even dig them up without injury to myself! Eh, I may as well just plod along with the pruning. Wish me luck……or at least some patience and perseverance.

Nathan has only occasionally shown interest in putting things up his nose, though after today’s antics he might be cured for good!

Nathan loves picking up sticks. Today, on our way back to the car after our playgroup in Hawthorn, he picked up a small gum tree branch that had loads of small gumnuts on it. He got into the car and waved it around, hitting Toby on the head a couple of times, at which point I told him that it would be confiscated if he did that again because it hurts Toby. I broke it down to a much smaller size and let him have the stick back, and he stopped waving and started picking the gumnuts off the it.

I strapped Toby into his seat and then went to strap Nathan in, just in time to see him about to put a gumnut up his nose. I told him not to put it up there. I wanted to take the stick away from him, but Nathan cried and I took the route of least resistance and let him keep it.

About half way home, and just as I entered the freeway, Nathan started screaming and crying. I looked in my rear vision mirror and saw him slapping his nose and sticking his fingers up there as he screamed. I asked him if he had put a gumnut up there, and he said he had….though his crying. I told him not to stick his fingers up there and to try to blow his nose to get it out. He snorted and snuffed, cried and cried. I told him there was nowhere to stop on the freeway and we were nearly home, so I would drive as fast as I could to get him to a doctor. There seem to be a heap of medical centers in our area.

The crying stopped and Nathan calmed down just before we reached the medical centre. I couldn’t get a clear answer from him as to whether it was still there or not, so I took him to the doctor anyway. It was a very subdued Nathan who presented at the medical centre where it was pronounced that the gumnut was no longer there. I asked him if he would put anything up his nose again, and I got an emphatic “no!”.

Heard from the back of the car through Toby’s unhappy grizzle….

“Toby can’t have it [the drink bottle] because it’s mine. I own it!”

At times it seems as if every word coming out of Nathan’s mouth is ‘why?’. Other times it is every second or third word, or he uses it to turn our answers into the next question. He uses it so much that he considers it his word. If we ever ask him ‘why?’, he will tell us not to use that word because “it’s my word!”.

Sometimes it is really hard to answer all the questions. I try very hard to answer them all without resorting to “it just is” or “just because”. In fact, I very rarely say either, though the temptation is great, particularly when the questioning goes something like….

Why is today Wednesday? Because yesterday was Tuesday. Why was yesterday Tuesday? Etc, etc, etc.

Nathan is a great fan of the phrase ‘just because’. I try to tell him that it isn’t a satisfactory answer, but a 2-year-old can’t be told, and Nathan thinks he knows all the best answers!

We were making a salad for dinner tonight, and I was mixing in some dressing.

Nathan: what’s that?
Me: salad dressing
Nathan: why are you putting that on there?
Me: to make the salad taste nice.
Nathan: why do you make the salad taste nice?
Me: because we like eating it more when it tastes really nice.
Nathan: why do we like eating it more?
Me: because we like eating yummy things.
Nathan: why is it yummy?
Me: I don’t think I can answer that, I don’t know what to tell you.
Nathan (helpfully suggests): just because

Our little fridge had been bugging me for a long time. It had a capacity of something like 300 litres including the freezer, and while that sounds a lot it really wasn’t when there are four people in the house. I usually do the veggie shopping once a week, and afterwards the fridge would be filled to capacity. That wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it tended to freeze things when it was full, and so we always wasted money by throwing out foods that were spoiled by the freezing. So I was quite excited by the idea of getting a big fridge when we moved into this house.

Andrew suggested that we also buy a washing machine and dryer. True, the house didn’t have a dryer, but then I don’t use them very much in general. We also had a washing machine that worked, so I was a bit resistant to buying a new one of those too. I caved in though, and the first weekend we had the keys to the house we headed off to see what sort of a deal we could manage to get for the products we decided that we wanted. We added to the purchases a few days later when Andrew rang up to get a dishwasher included in the delivery.

The items all came a few weeks ago now. I think that both Andrew and I were surprised at how our monster fridge seemed to dominate the kitchen, but we are getting used to it. The dishwasher sat in it’s packaging for over 2 weeks but it is finally installed now. We had to pay someone to do it because we couldn’t get the cupboard out to create the space for it. It looked a simple job to remove it, but we didn’t know it was screwed, nailed and glued in, and we didn’t have the tools to deal with that.

I think that all purchases have been good ones. The new washing machine is amazing and really has made me realize that the old one was not washing particularly well, and is so big that I don’t have to wash every day (I even fitted two bath sheets, two normal
sized towels, a bath mat, two hand towels and some nappies in one load….that was two loads in the old machine). The dryer is fine, but hasn’t been used much yet, and today when out shopping I bought watermelon without worrying about whether the fridge would freeze it, or whether it would fit. The dishwasher had it’s inaugural load last night, so I didn’t have to spend all my spare time washing dishes in-between dealing with a wakeful baby.

I don’t know what the world is coming to when I’m excited by buying white goods!

Test. Silly word press..

Just trying to add photos to the blog in a different way. Looks like it is successful. 🙂

On our way home from our Easter camping trip we went to Questacon which is a fabulous place for hands-on science for kids.  We love going there and Nathan has a ball!  This time Nathan got to hold a baby chicken see baby chickens in the process of hatching as well as going to our regular attractions such as the area for babies and toddlers, the dinosaurs and the lightening room.

Eggs in an incubator

Measuring distance

Toby in the baby area

Nathan fishing for crabs

Dr. Nathan

Dr. Nathan

Nathan the construction worker

Driving