A Week Away

Green through every window

Is it just me or are overalls really cool?

It looked so much like something I'd be paying $15 a kilo for at home, but I am just not game to risk it

Sheoak Falls  - with water

New fireplace, hot milk and friends Iris and Audrey

Sassy and Grace

Big fat koala

Bouquets

New passion

No big kids allowed

Gully preparing his marshmellow toasting stick

We just had a week away and though I took my decent camera, the convenience of the iPhone always seems to trump lugging the SLR around.  It's a shame, really, when the scenery deserves better treatment.  A week seemed such a luxuriously long time to spend surrounded by intense beauty, and even the fact that it barely stopped raining for five of the days, and hailed as we were walking to Sheoak Falls, couldn't detract from the pleasure.  We had visitors galore and it was so good to share this place with others.  I delighted in the fun all the kids had playing in the abundant mud, until I didn't, and then I was completely over it.  Over the mud caked gum boots, the 'mud gloves', the filthy trousers, the squelchy runners, the mud caked car interior that will eventually (hopefully by somebody other than me) require cleaning.  We had a very chilly day on the beach where all the kids except Lily swam and I stood around in long johns and all my Boston-winter gear and still felt cold.  Have I gone soft so quickly?  Not long ago I would have braced the water too, but supervising seven kids was enough, without also freezing my tits off.  Hot chips and potato cakes after hot showers eventually warmed us all up.  We went yabbying in the dam (without luck - apparently not the right season for yabbies) and Nina had an unscheduled dip up to her waist when what appeared to be a puddle turned out to be a water-hole.  We saw mobs of kangeroos, a couple of koalas (or the same koala twice, more likely) and had daily visits from the window-bombing kookaburras who, like stray cats, visited at meal-times hoping for a scrap.  We found a skull and some bones of an animal and tried to figure out what it would be - probably a kangeroo we thought.  We saw (and heard) owls, stacked wood, painted (half) the house,  discovered and disposed of the source of the terrible smell behind the fridge, drank a lot of tea, did the cryptic cross-word (not terribly successfully) each night, handquilted a small quilt, played bananagrams, explored, rode a trail-bike, watched the moon wax, checked out the surf, toasted marshmellows, baked scones, read 'Remembering Babylon', slept in and stayed up late.  It was such a superb holiday that the week ahead and all the mundane realities of our daily lives, feels a wee bit depressing.