The One About Inori

Ok, again, procrastinating with the 2nd part of the overland trip…..

I’ve been busy busy busy with the reopening of my online store and hoping to reopen very soon! It’s currently undergoing a face-lift as well as spanking new (handmade!! by me!!) products in store.

So.. yes! After taking many readers’ advice, I’m finally selling my handmade stuff online. You’ll just have to wait to see what I will be offering!

I forsee 2010 to be a very very busy year for me. I’ve enrolled as a full time student (but studying from home) and will be sitting entrance exams to Bachelor of Medicine/Surgery in July as well as in November.

I will be taking 5 pre-tertiary subjects this year, namely Maths, Physical Science, Chemistry, Biology and English. (Yeah, don’t ask why English. It’s compulsory… -___-” )

Really hope I can cope with the store + studies + kids!

School starts end of February so I have from now till then to work extremely hard for the store. Then it will be time to balance these 3 jobs of mine. Pray that God will give me the strength to do this and still remain sane and cheerful!

Anyway, I just dropped in to introduce to you some new guys in our family!

Remember I mentioned a couple of posts down that the mover guys lost our bed slats and we had to go out to get wood to lay under the matteress?

Well, we had to cut the wood to size (the warehouse guys do this service for free!) and thus we had some off-cuts.

I looked at them (the off-cuts, not the warehouse guys) and thought that I would put them into good use.

So with these:

Wood, sandpaper, nails and hammer, I made this:

And it sits happily on my sewing/work bench. I’m very happy with it.

And then there’s this fellow:

Haha. Don’t worry. We haven’t adopted another cat. That would be highly unfair to Kelly. This stray visits us from time to time and he’s very friendly. He likes to sit on top of our car for some reason. I fed him with some doggy food on some occasions.

I named him Mr. Bingley (No prizes for guessing what classic I’m reading right now) but Nad suggested “Mr. Bing” (after Chandler Bing from FRIENDS, Matthew Perry’s character).

Mr. Bing doesn’t come very often nowadays. Well, that’s the style of strays I guess. Easy come, easy go. I saw him yesterday perched on the neighbour’s porch and promptly ignored me when I mewed to him. Tsk. Cats.

Then, on my mum’s birthday, she bought me this:

Yes.. you read it right. SHE bought me a present on HER birthday. Hahaha. She’s an awesome mum like that.

An overlocking machine to help with my online store creations!

I named her Lizzy Harmony and she’s sitting right next to Brother:

I love how they are colour coordinated, like a happy little family. She’s a dream to use and is a perfect companion to ol’ Brother.

And then we have a surrogate mum:

Her name is Mama Chooki and she’s a loan from a very dear friend of ours. She’s currently sitting on 8 eggs (well, she started with 9 but kicked one out yesterday) and we hope to be chicky parents on or around 20 Feb.

Don’t worry about the eggs sticking out. I eased them back under after taking this photo.

We won’t count our chicks before they hatch so fingers crossed that there won’t be anymore cases of the chicken version of an abortion or miscarriage!

I read somewhere that in summer, a higher percentage of chicks would be males so HOPEFULLY, we get a couple of female chicks!

Mama Chooki is a good mama and although she looks pissed (well, a broody hen is always pissed I guess), she’s rather patient with my peering into her little house to make sure she’s okay.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a picture with chubby Chubbs…

I followed him into the room and found him in this position, bobbing up and down in a little baby jiggle.

SOOOOO CUTE!

Hellooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s been soooo long!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you everyone for the comments left while I was gone…. I will try to reply them one by one so please be patient! I’m not ignoring anyone!!!

So.. yes… as you can imagine, I have much to say and many pictures to show.

We reached our destination in mid December but because of the Xmas and New Year holidays, it took so long for our furniture to arrive as well as the phone AND internet to be connected. The phone would have been connected earlier but the telephone company made a huge mistake and cut off my neighbour’s line instead of installing ours!!!!!!!! *Duh!*

THEN, our removalists managed to lose A LOT OF items. For example, Sunshine’s wooden table (very sad over this as Ikea doesn’t produce this anymore!), our bed slats (what good is the bed frame without the slats!?!?!?), parts of my armchair (again, from Ikea)… our hot water flask, my lace blocking kit and mats!!!! (ARRGHHH!!!), and many more items.

We are of course, very miffed and will be filing a complaint as well as claiming from insurance.

We had to buy wood boards from a hardware store (I love Bunnings, don’t you?) to use as the bed base, try not to wobble the armchair from side to side and grieve over the other lost items. (T___T)

Alright. I’m going to break our trip into 2 parts. To be honest, I don’t know when I can write part 2 of this post as we still have plenty to do around the house but I try my best.

There are 40 pictures in this post so if you have slow connection, or limited time, consider yourself warned.! Hahaha. Otherwise, click ahead!

(more…)

I was just looking at my old posts when Sunshine was 7 months old. Here.

She could stand on her own at 7 months and even get up on all fours….
Chubbs has turned 7 months and he still cannot do all these things! I wonder is it because we’ve been neglecting him?

He can sit on his own but that’s about it. He HATES being on his tummy since birth. I’ve been trying to get him to turn from his back to his tummy but he hates it. He would rather lie flat. He can roll from his tummy back to being on his back though. And he’s ever rolled from his back to his tummy, pushed himself a few centimeters to get to a toy. But I’ve only seen him doing that once.

Oh dear… Are boys generally slower than girls or are we neglecting him or is he just too fat? (I think he’s about 10kg now and Sunshine weighs only 10-11kg NOW!)

Should we be worried?

I’ve been busy studying. Exams are this Tues and Wed for both sciences and next Mon is my Maths exam.

So I’ll leave you with a quick pictorial update:

Us at the park.

Chubbs was wearing gloves coz’ he’s breaking out in heat rash and scratches his neck very often.

I know. I need to lose weight. *Sigh*.

“Hi?”

“Mum, this is getting old. Put it down.”

I’m not biased ok. Sunshine hates taking photos. Back to study.

So………. these are the other items I’ve been rushing like mad to complete:

I made two of these:

They look like that when both are hung up behind the car seats:

It’s to store the kids’ books, toys, flash cards, umbrellas, hats etc etc.

We already have a mesh pocket at the back of both front seats but it was over flowing and driving me nuts. Besides, we need more ’slots’ to store those various stuff in!

Here’s a close up:

If you look closely, you can see the tabs I made with velcro sewn on. These are to hold plastic bags of rubbish or to hang my knitting bags on road trips

I also sewed on these purdy labels:

Nad likes the organisers. I guess that hard work didn’t go to waste afterall!

Ever since Chubbs started to sit in his baby chair instead of the infant car seat, I’ve been wanting to make seat belt covers for him.

Sunshine has a pair that someone gave to us when she was born.

So I made these:

to match with the car organisers!

Then I thought that I should make one pair for Sunshine too.

So that she won’t feel left out! (And the backseat would also be more coordinated… hehehe)

How do you find my new car ‘decorations’? I think Chubbs likes it pretty much!

(Notice the car themed fabric? I love the blue!)

So why all this rush and why the sudden urge to sew stuff for the car?

Remember I wrote about The Project not long ago? Because it’s a HUGE Project, it comes in many parts.

Some parts have been done now and the next part is actually to move house.

Uh huh. we are moving. Relocating. Woohoo! And not just across the street. Not across a few suburbs either! Not even across the same state! Yep. We are moving INTERSTATE.

We will be taking the road because we want to punish ourselves /are out of our minds/ want to see Australia and it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.

3 adults (including my dearest sister who so lovingly offered to come along and squeeze in between two babies in the car), 2 babies, 2 dogs and I would imagine, quite a lot of luggage. All in our not-so-big car. Woohoo! Fun times! (Not?)

We plan to take the drive slow. No rush and would probably be on the road for more than a week.

Apparently, if we drove for 24 hours straight a day, we can reach our destination in less than 2 days. Lol!!!!

So therefore, I had to rush through my spinning and sewing projects because we have to pack. My sewing machine has been kept away in her box and my sewing table dismantled. My spinning wheel has to be put aside too.

The side effects of that is that I have severe castonitis. I want to cast on 4 sweaters and like 5 shawls and many other projects now. AND bring them all on the trip with me.

What? You’ll never know what can happen! Our stuff might be delayed for a year and these projects would be the only ones I’ll have for that year! We could be stranded in the desert (although apart from sanity reasons, I don’t see how knitting can help us in the desert) *touch a lot of wood*! We could go through a snowstorm!!! (In summer.) Hey! Anything can happen!

So yeah!

My exams are in 2 to 3 weeks and we are moving right after them. If I had a stress level gauge, it would be hitting the sky by now. I think I’ve been acting rather cuckoo recently due to all these…..factors and probably stepped on Nad’s toes quite a lot. Sigh. I need to take a chill pill.

So would you help me move by going to my store:

And buy some yarn?

Relocation sale, baybee! (We ship worldwide. Just send an enquiry for a quote.)