A break

As of last Friday I have officially been a lady of leisure! The money came through, so we now have a bigger mortgage & I couldn't be happier!

We have enough to pay all our loan repayments & bills for about 3 months. So my days are now very, very different. This is the 1st time in 12 years that I don't have to work. It's taking a bit of getting used to. My 1st reaction was to get very, very tired! I suppose my body decided that it is allowed to be tired now, so I slept & slept & slept for a few days. I've still had a bit of work as my current auctions end. My store will stay open of course, I have about 700 listing up & something sells every day, so there's be some spending money coming in, & I'll still do a few auctions every week as time permits. I will be putting more energy into selling offline, I'm having a clothing sale from home this weekend & will advertise in the local paper every couple of weeks. I have thousands of items of summer clothing to sell (not to mention the winter gear that's now going into storage), boxes of books, toys, cloth nappies, maternity wear, shoes & other bits & pieces. So I'll keep it trickling out as time permits.

The priority now though is the house, keeping Kim's time free to get over there every morning & work as many hours as he can every day. Now that the weather has warmed up (thank goodness for an early summer) we have started having dinner at the house, we have a good little kitchen set up with running water, fridge, BBQ, microwave, kettle, toaster, etc.

We then get home, bath & bed the kids & have an evening to relax. Heaven!!!
Today I'm getting a few parcels ready to go & them I'm taking the kids for a picnic lunch at the lake. I feel like I'm on holidays! The laundry, dishes, housework & kids are nothing compared to what I've been doing for the last few years, the hours have been ridiculous. No more late nights working, we all get up together at about 6 & I'm in bed by 10pm for a full 8 hours sleep. It's all very strange still, as I said, taking some getting used to. The guilt is still dominant, "I should be working," "I should be taking photos while I watch this show' etc. I can't wait to lose that feeling!

Kim has started on the kitchen roof. We're expecting rain this weekend so he's just getting it all ready to go & hopefully will be able to get it done next week. He's spent the last week pottering about doing bits & pieces, getting his shed ready for making windows, etc. We bought him a new thicknesser off ebay, he's pretty happy with that. We've also spent some time tidying up the block, we had begun accumulating a bit too much just so it was good to clean up a bit.

My vege patch is well under way with 4 different tomatoes, cucumbers, silver beet, zuccini, endive, beetroot, peas & beans planed. Trying to get some watermelon sees happenning but they won't come up, same with capsicum. Might buy seedlings instead, it'd be nice to have watermelon from the garden for Christmas! I'm loving my garden!

The kids are all good, Brody is back from 6 weeks in Canada, he's off to the Yurt farm In Goulburn with Mario this weekend. Chelsea's on holidays for 2 weeks & making the most of every day to socialise so we don't see much of her. Finn is being hard work, very autistic lately. Screamed at Ivy yesterday when she wouldn't play the game to his liking "you can't do it like that, that's not the rules", he likes his rules. Still in the midst of the assessment, the psych was supposed to go watch him playing at Steph's yesterday but Ziggy had a tummy bug so we had to postpone. At Steph's he plays on his own & follows Steph around, or he tries to get the other kids to play his way which almost never happens. His speech is quite funny lately, he goes into long drawn out explanations or questions, or directions. eg, yesterday when telling Kim to take something to the block:
"Dad, when you go to the block can you get it from by the door, and then put it in the ute, and then when you get dressed & go to the block can you take it in the ute with you to the block, and when you get to the block can you take it out of the ute & put it in the shed so it's at the block now?".
He talks like this a LOT, so everything takes soooo looong to say, it drives us nuts when we're rushing around trying to get things done. We really don't know what to do about it. We just repeat what he's said in 1/4 the words & hope he'll get the picture eventually. he can finally count to 10 , at least he gets it right most times. We've been told this is normal for his age but I don't buy it, he's the 1st 4 year old I've known who can't count to 10.
Ivy is being very "2", but cute, bright & so affectionate it's hard to not just love her to bits all the time! The whine is increasing in frequency though, we'll have to work on that!