Christmas 2011

We had a really nice day celebrating the birth of our Lord and Saviour last Sunday. Dad, Mum and my lovely brothers and sisters (except Paul and Ingrid and girls) came to our house after church and we enjoyed coffee, cake and a buffet lunch of assorted meats and salads together. Rod's parents were still living with us at that time (they've finally been allowed home now) so it was nice to celebrate Christmas with them too. It was also great to have Paul and Heidi, Naomi, Chanel and Jorden back with us - they have just moved back to Australia from Holland!

Paul, Heidi and Rod helping themselves to lunch

Annette with Damon, Rod, Paul, Justin (who finds it hard to be normal for photos),
Marcel and Charlene

Olivia and Naomi

my lovely brothers Paul and Marcel

Chanel (running away from the camera) and Olivia

Pop, Nanna and Devon enjoying their lunch

At night everyone came around again, Paul and Ingrid too this time, and we had a light dinner together. We also had heaps of laughs playing Pictionary and Charades :-) bit of a pity I didn't take any photos of that!

11.11.11

I know it was a couple of weeks ago now, but the 11th of the 11th 2011 was a pretty cool day because:
1. I got to go out for morning tea with all my lovely sisters and my Dad and Mum. We just wanted to help Renee celebrate the end of 13 years of schooling! The graduation ceremony is tonight - can't wait to see her all dressed up...it doesn't happen that often ;-)

with the lovely Renee herself

such a beautiful setting at 'Mia Flora Tea Gardens'

Mother with all her daughters (and Anya)

mmm, such good cake! I think it was a flour-less chocolate cake
and of course a hot chocolate

Annette and Damon, Renee, Charlene, Ingrid and Anya,
Dad and Mum having a good chinwag

2. Glenn, Leonie and kids came up from Albany so that Glenn could give Rod a hand with putting all the retic in and laying the grass at our house!

very spoiled with roll on grass

Marcel came and helped finish it off on Saturday

and Olivia and Devon had great fun playing with Lauren and Hannah
bit bright kids?

Devon compacting the grass


and the finished product!

a swag :-)

"A modern swag is a waterproof canvas sleeping compartment that is sometimes insect-proof. All swags come with a foam mattress, and can comfortably be slept in with the addition of a pillow and sleeping bag. When rolled up the swag is relatively lightweight and compact, making it ideal for storage and transport. It is typically easy to erect and roll up can be done quickly."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swag_%28bedroll%29)

Here's a few pics I found on the internet...might make more sense to you then :-)

Rod has one like this

but mine's a bit fancier and looks like this...well, it's meant to.
Rod picked it up at a garage sale and it didn't have the poles with it, so really it lies flat like his.

and they roll up like this -
that's what's on our roof rack, if you look closely

Camping

Last Friday was a public holiday seeing as CHOGM was on in Perth, so instead of having breakfast with the Queen, we decided to go for a bit of a drive and go camping overnight. I've been saying to Rod for a while that I'd like to go out to Toodyay (which is about 1.5hours north-east of here) while the weather is still cool and hopefully everything is still a bit green and the Avon river is flowing. So that's what we did. We have a book with a few different 4WD day trips out of Perth in it, and one of the trips was out this way too, so we decided to follow the directions in the book and see where it took us :-)

All packed and ready to go

having lunch along the Avon River

We then did some more driving around and checked out some of the campsites. They were all pretty full and not really what we expected, so we ended up back tracking and finding a campsite on the other side of the river where only one other couple were camped. It had a drop dunny, a fire pit and a picnic table which was just right.Miss Olivia enjoying the fire and Devon running to his chair so
he doesn't miss out on being in the photo!

dinner time

roasting marshmallows

Devon was only interested in playing in the car with his torch

So maybe you're wondering where we all slept and how the kids went at night. Well...we had already told Olivia and Devon a few days before we went that we'd go camping and they would be sleeping in the car. Olivia thought that'd be great of course but Devon wasn't too sure about it. He kept saying that we should take the camper and coming up with all sorts of reasons, like "Camper got beds in it" and "Camper got table and chairs". Anyway, we weren't going to take the camper and he'd just have to sleep in the car. So come bed time, he has his sleeping area all set up next to the fridge there and we had Olivia on the backseat, which you can fold down. She was well and truly ready to sleep but Devon was just so wired and would not settle down. He kept switching on the interior light and playing with his torch, sitting up and doing all sorts of stuff. After a few good telling offs and smacks he still wasn't calming down or showing any signs of sleeping so we ended up taking the fridge out, putting the cargo barrier down and putting the kids next to each other so that I could lie with them and hopefully get Devon to calm down and sleep. Hahaha like fun! Anyway, after ignoring him for a bit while he climbed all through the car, then holding him on my lap by the fire and being told "I not love you!", then lying next to him again, he finally crashed around 9:45pm, holding his precious torch and we (thankfully) didn't hear him or Olivia till 6 the next morning :-)
Rod and I slept in our swags under the stars by the way.

mmm, bacon and eggs for breakfast!

our campsite with the dunny in the background

these bright blue flowers are all through the bush - very pretty!

having some morning smoko in Toodyay

Rod was watching this guy trying to get his car started for a while and in the end he thought he better see if he needed a hand. Turns out the guy was a medic (he'd saved someone's life already that morning) and the car was his mates and he actually didn't have a clue what to do to get it going! After a jump start it was all good again.

From Toodyay we drove down through Northam and then to York where
we checked out the car museum. Lots of old and interesting cars in there!

Isn't this one just the right size for Devon?

some very old cars

Hey! A corolla like I used to drive!

A photo from Olivia - she thought these were pretty cool telephone boxes

Backyard work...

Our work on redoing the backyard has seen a lot of progress in the last couple of months!

Remember this is how it used to look:a year ago

August 2011
We are not connected to mains sewage and therefore have leach drains. At the moment they're
towards the back of the block and we can't do much with that bit of land, except grow grass on it, so Rod decided to put new ones in directly behind the house seeing as that's where the grass area is going to be anyway.

so here's a view of the retaining wall Rod and his band of merry helpers built and all the leach drains covered over with sand where one day we'll have beautiful green grass to run around on and enjoy :-)

steps out near the laundry door
(they've been cemented up now)

Rodger the welder building the trusses for the new patio

old patio

And this past Saturday, the merry band of helpers (Paul Byl, Marcel, Mike and Justin)
came to help barrow the concrete into the patio area. Tony from Rod's work helped out
with all the screeding and technical sides of working with concrete


And there it is! All poured and ready for honing...

...so eventually it will look something like this:

Dad and Mum van der Schaaf celebrated 40 years of marriage on Sunday the 9th of October, so we went down to Albany on the weekend to join in with the celebrations. On Saturday afternoon, everyone (except Fritz and Viv and kids) enjoyed each others company while playing a game of 10 pin bowling :) Was great fun!

some of the van der Schaaf crew:
Ethan (in the stripey shorts), Olivia, Ezra (mini Pop), Devon
Darryl (in the red jumper), Rod, Glenn, Lauren (looking backwards)
Michael, Kara, Sienna (her daughter) and Kathryn

Rod showing us his style

Mike showing Zachary how it's done


I didn't take any photos on Sunday, but we all had coffee, cake and nibblies at Dad and Mum's house. Dad has just had another knee replacement and hasn't been feeling too great, so we just kept it low key. Next year March we all hope to go away for 3 days to a farm stay down south which should be nice.

We had to leave early Monday morning because I had a doctor's appointment at 10am, which I couldn't really change. I took Olivia along and we got to see the baby on the doctor's ultrasound machine which was really neat! Here's one of the clearer pictures he printed off for me - head to the right and body to the left if you can't work it out :-P. I'll be going for the 19 week anatomy scan in a few weeks time (I'm 16 weeks now!) so then we'll get some better pics hopefully :-) Looking forward to it!