a Beer, a Whine and The Spirit

We have new friends. They are awesome. They are friends we met through church and we just clicked. I joked with them that it's like a summer romance that we don't want to end. We are cramming in as much time together as possible, before we go our separate ways. The mum of the family and I have been hanging out a lot the last three weeks, and it feels like her, her husband, and four beautiful daughters have been a part of our lives for so much longer than that. It's so hard to believe we only met weeks ago, not years. And I'm convinced Hubs and "the dad" were brothers in a previous life. They are ridiculously similar in so many ways. It's awesome.

I was also introduced to the mum's bestie up here, and she is just as delightful. It still blows my mind how many amazing, beautiful, like-minded people there are out there to meet, and how we keep getting lucky with meeting so many of them.

And in a few weeks time, the three of us will have left Ingham. One to the west, one to the north and one to the south. This is truly one of those God moments for me; I know he has ensured we crossed paths, and that there is so much more to come for our families. Maybe not now, but some day.

Posted by Renae at 10:48 PM Comments

Hubs and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary in the first weekend of December, and we took full advantage of my parents being here, and went away for 2 nights. Well, sort of. I'm still feeding Quinn, so we needed to stay pretty close to home so Mum could bring the kids to us for the day on Saturday. But we had 2 nights away and that's what counts!

We stayed at Hinchinbrook Marine Cove Resort at Lucinda which was rather nice. We had a great view which was my only request when booking the accommodation. Hubs ended up having to work late on the Friday night, so I went and checked us in around 5pm since the place was only 20 minutes away, and put the champagne sparkling white in the fridge to chill for our arrival. I'm glad I did, as we didn't end up arriving until almost 10:30pm!

We had a nice evening and a pretty good night sleep (nothing is as good as your own bed though!! Shame ours is in storage...) and Mum brought the kids up on Saturday morning, arriving around 8:30am.

Dad had gone fishing for the day up at Cardwell. Poor Mum had a bit of a rough night with Quinn, but in a cute way. Quinn woke up around 3am and just wanted a chat. For almost 2 hours!! So we took Chance to the pool while Mum and Quinn had a little rest.


It was quite hot and the pool was SO lovely. The shade cover made it very easy for us to hand around for over 2 hours! We had an easy lunch, and then I don't really know where the rest of the day went! We just hung out and watched the boats and lazed around. We said goodbye to Mum and the kids around 6pm and said helllloooooo to Moet:

Posted by Renae at 5:25 PM Comments

A few months ago, my lovely cousin asked me for my recipe for pierogi, as she wanted to try her hand at it sometime. I suggested that when I was in town the following month (October), that maybe we could make it together. Actually, I said "LET'S MAKE THIS HAPPEN" in no uncertain terms. So we did. And it was awesome. And so was the pierogi :-)

Getting pretty close to how Nanny used to make it! A few more tries should do it :-)

Posted by Renae at 3:37 PM Comments

We headed down to Townsville last weekend for Chance's 3rd birthday party and had such a great time. We had a bit of a "pirate party" theme happening and Hubs really got into the dressing up, courtesy of op-shop bargain hunting by me, and pirate Chanbe looked pretty cute too.

Posted by Renae at 3:38 PM Comments

Posted by Renae at 11:38 PM Comments

So it turns out Ingham Chickens aren't from Ingham. It was rather a disappointment to me, if I were to be completely honest. One that I got over very quickly, but I realised I had been making the Ingham chicken love 'em joke for a little while and well, don't I look sheepish.

Moving on.

We have internet!! Obviously. This makes me very happy. Except we don't have much internet. We have gone from 200GB of ADSL a month to 3GB of wireless. It's not pretty. I have a lot of reading to catch up on my feedly account, but I don't want to blow our data limit!!

Ingham is great. The trip here went well - I drove the land cruiser towing our dodgy trailer (Hubs calls it "agricultural"...) with the red baron on top (see below) while he drove the kombi. We both made it with no trouble. The house they (the hospital) have provided for us is really lovely. I was a bit disappointed when they told us they didn't have one of the lovely new roomy units available for us, and that they were putting us up in the older house, but as soon as we walked in the door, we knew we'd love it here.

We've just been settling in, albeit quickly, going to church the day after we arrived, and having someone over for dinner already, plus our friends came to stay for the weekend! The kids have been a bit sick on and off since we arrived, and Chanbe has been somewhat displaced and a bit challenging, but we are doing well.

We are heading down to T'ville for the weekend for Chanbe's 3rd birthday party which Mum and Dad are coming up for, and then they are coming to stay here next week which will be lovely.

As usual, I'll let the photos tell the rest of the story!!

So that's us updated for now. We haven't really gotten into any kind of routine as yet, as there have been a lot of days sleeps (them, not me :-( ) which has thrown things out of whack a bit. But I'm not really in need of routine at the moment. This is like a bit of a holiday for us, so we're just going with the flow. Because that's what you do in north Queensland ay?

Posted by Renae at 10:55 PM Comments

Posted by Renae at 12:14 PM Comments

Even though we don't leave Townsville (moving to Ingham for 10 weeks for Hubs' last placement as an intern) til Friday the 8th of November, the removalists are coming on Monday to put everything into storage, and we are moving in with our friends Haz, Maz, Jaz and Az (Haz and Maz are good friends of ours - Maz and Hubs are interns together - and Jaz and Az are their boys who are the same age as Chanbe and Quindy.) Got it? Confused?? Yeah, me too :-)

But we are getting there! And my stress levels are surprisingly low, hence me feeling like I can spare 10 minutes to write a blog post! There's still a lot to do, but I'm 100% sure it can be done in time for the moving van to arrive Monday morning. And the great thing is, Mum is still around looking after the kids, and Hubs has had most of this week off. He also has 3 days off next week so we can get the house ready for new renters to (hopefully) move in asap.

So yes, as well as moving, there have been the usual amount of goings-on. But like I said, my stress levels are way down on this time last year! Hubs and I took full advantage of Mum being here and went out for a delicious Japanese dinner last night. Just our luck. We're about to leave town when we find an awesome place to eat! Can't believe we're already packing this house up. Where did the year go?

Oh well. On to the next adventure!!

Posted by Renae at 2:50 PM Comments

A couple of months ago, Hubs and I were given a bottle of Moet Champagne, and have since been looking for/trying to make an opportunity to share it in celebration of Hubs finishing his PhD. The time came on Friday night when Hubs and set off for a picnic on the banks of the Ross River. Mum is staying with us at the moment, so we headed off around 5:30pm and wished Mum all the best.

We found a lovely clearing about 10-15min bike ride from our house and set ourselves up.

Posted by Renae at 7:50 PM Comments