I realised the other day that I have been so busy sorting, editing and blogging photos from our Fiji trip and Astrid’s birthday that I have barely gotten the camera out in the last month.  In most months I take around 500 photos, giver or take a couple of hundred. When we travel I always take more, but June was a busy month and I racked up 1679…….. it took me awhile to get through all of those!

As a result of all that photo editing and us madly trying to declutter and sort out the house in order to get the junk/spare room ready for the baby, July has been a pretty pathetic month on the photo front!  I did actually import the last months photos the other day and I took a whole 47 photos in July!  My poor camera must be feeling neglected 🙁

I also don’t know what happened to July……. it seemed to pass in a flash!  What did we get up to in the last month?

After recovering from our trip and Astrid’s party we left her with my mum for the day and headed to Sydney to IKEA to grab her a big girl bed and some bookcases and other bits and pieces for the babies room.  A big day of driving in the wet and coming home with a (very) packed car, and mission accomplished but now we have even more stuff we have to fit into our junk (babies) room.

That spawned operation clean-up where we started de-cluttering and tidying up room by room. We are trying to be ruthless and a lot of stuff has gone to charity/recycling/the tip. It’s good to have lots of rooms cleaned up and cupboards and drawers all tidy and sorted. 2/3 of the house is done and the garage (the place where everything goes to accumulate and clutter) is a work in progress but I have been assured it will be finished soon, so I can get my car back in!

We also did a garden tidy up and pruned our fruit trees and got some winter veg into our vegie beds and re-did our herb garden for Spring. I think we picked the only nice day all month to be outside for that! July has been cold, windy and quite damp………  I was getting a bit over the weather.

Anto took a week off work to get some of the tidying up around the house and garden done. This ‘happened’ to coincide with his Rapha riding challenge where he had to ride the equivalent ascent as the Alps section of the Tour de France, while the Tour riders were completing it. He did this challenge last year, and I wasn’t a fan. This year he was better prepared and he got yelled at on a daily basis by his wife and child to ride up more hills to get it over and done with! The weather also didn’t cooperate, but he finished it 3 days ahead of schedule, with minimal whinging. I still maintain his week off would have been more productive with less riding involved but Astrid seemed to enjoy hearing about all the mountain riding, and we went out and met him a few times as he was doing laps of Black Mountain to have coffee and lunch with him. He also made her helper stool and spent a lot of time getting the garage under control (and other bits of the house) so things did get done…….

Aside from the never ending tidying up (the house looks worse than when we started) we commenced operation ‘big girl’ with Astrid. She was dead keen on moving to her new bed but we started with removing the side from her cot and putting on the toddler rail to turn it into a toddler bed. She loves to climb in and out herself now, and has only gotten herself out of bed twice (in the middle of the night of course!) so she might get to move to the bed soon if she continues to do well.  Then I thought it was a good time to start toilet training, a task I’ve been putting off for about 6 months. Not necessarily the best idea when almost 7 months pregnant and it’s freezing cold, but after a couple of revolting weeks of tedium we are doing well. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time sitting on cold bathroom floors reading endless stories and discussing bodily functions but I’ve been reliably informed by the toddler that her nappies can all be moved to the babies room now (along with her change table and cot) as she is a ‘big girl’ and doesn’t need them. I’m quite enjoying not having to wash nappies after 2 years of it!

So that has kept us fairly busy. Not many photos to show all our hard work (I really need to take photos of the revolting state of the babies room so we can compare when it’s finally done), but I did find a few cute photos from the month.

Here is Astrid dancing and looking quite grown up (photos by Anto):

Some generally being cheeky, wearing her new beanie knitted for her birthday by our friend Karin:

Astrid has also been fascinated by the baby in my tummy and wants to know all about how she used to be in my tummy and when she was little, so we have been reading her first year photo album fairly regularly. Apparently looking at photos of yourself is great when you are 2!

And finally, I knew I mustn’t have taken many photos recently, when the other day Astrid asked me ‘mum where is your camera? Please take photos of Astrid!’ So I had to comply, and she happened to be eating her toasted cheese and ham sandwich, looking cheeky as ever at 25 months!