The Dower Family

It has been a very busy week around here. Thursday saw us spending the afternoon with Nanna Carmel and Aunty Emma which Ollie always gets such a kick out of. My favourite part of the afternoon was watching Ollie shaking his hands at the dogs and saying "shush" to them, just like Nanna! Friday was Ollie's first date. Well play date at least. B has a girl friend at daycare called Maddy and apparently they love each other. She calls him "Ollie-ba" and tells other people that he is hers. Even the daycare teachers are joking that they will have to be invited to the wedding since they were the ones who introduced them. Not wanting to stand in the way of true love, I organised a playdate with Maddy's mum (who has recently moved to the area too) at the little library. It was quite funny seeing the difference in Ollie's behaviour when she was there. For some strange reason Ollie is a bit shy at the little library (as opposed to the boy who jumped out of ...

There has been a fair bit of bread around this house in the last few days thanks to my belated mother's day/credit card point redeeming purchase of a breadmaker. I've been looking into it for quite a while so I'm over the moon to finally be able to bake my own bread with the greatest of ease. I'd love to have a photo to show you some of my efforts but they keep getting gobbled up. It probably isn't conducive to a low carb diet (not that pregnant ladies should be holding out on carbs, or chocolate, or danish, or brownies...) but it fits in well with my gradual efforts to try to make more things at home in an effort to limit the amount of processed foods we consume - which was fairly limited anyway. So far I'm making yoghurt each week (truly yummo), now bread and I've tried muesli bars with limited success but continued enthusiasm. Next on the list is to bottle some delicious pasta sauces using up the overwhelming supply of basil and oregano I have growing...

Well I have now been lucky enough to have three mother's days and they seem to get even more fun as Ollie gets older and is able to understand the concept a little bit. This year it started off with a lovely morning tea at Ollie's daycare on Friday. There were lots of mummy/Ollie activities for us to get involved in but my favourite had to be making me a beautiful coloured pasta necklace. I may have had to finish it off myself when his interest waned but that didn't make it any less special. I actually have been wearing it quite a bit however had to finally take it off on Monday after I kept finding broken sharp bits of pasta in my shirt. We also embraced our own mother's day craft at home, making some lovely photo frames for Nanna Carmel & Nanna Freddy to give them over the weekend. Obear was much more enthusiastic about this task, possibly too enthusiastic as the painting wasn't restricted to the intended area. Thank goodness for water based paints. On t...

You might recall about 18 months ago we set up what was known as "Camp Ollie" on our back deck at the old place. It was the perfect play area for a much younger Ollie to roll around while I could relax a bit as well. This was the idea behind our latest DIY project around here, a new and improved Camp Ollie, and Evie!!! So with our downstairs previously unused deck as the location and the desire to create an area that gave us a bit more variety of play options on the many days we will have at home in the near future, we have been trying to figure out how to tackle this for a few weeks. Ideas of expensive outdoor furniture gave way to a great ebay find of some very old cane chairs and a bit of vision, a trip to Ikea, a few nights on the sewing machine sewing new covers and an afternoon of Nick spraying the chairs (well most of them) and this is what you get, all for the grand total of $200 (including some green tubs for toys which you can't see). I'm pretty happy ...