Sundays in my City #11 - Soccer Star?

Things around here are so busy that there is little chance to get out and about with the camera.  One fairly regular occurrence does allow for plenty of photos to be taken.  In fact, Sundays around here really could be re-named Soccer Sunday.  That means far-too-early-for-a-weekend wake-ups, long drives to suburbs we have never visited and lots of standing around in the cold, taking photos and screaming like a banshee cheering as the girls run up and down the pitch having a great time.  Some days they look like they actually know what they are doing and are actually playing soccer, some days not so much.  Either way, they always have fun.

The times where it appears that she really knows what she is doing are becoming more frequent...

In fact, some times she looks like she is a little super star!

Despite what is happening in the actual game, there is plenty of entertainment.

Sometimes the oranges at half time are a little sour!

Other times make you wonder what exactly the purpose of the exercise is!

Always, you can see a group of girls having a great time, win lose or draw.

If you want to join in the fun of Sundays in my City too, click on over to Unknown Mami.

Happy to have Homework?

Now it isn't often that I am happy to have homework, or that I even want to do homework but today it was different.  I had to choose my own topic and it was the best topic ever - AJ's Awesome Triple Layer Cake.

As you can see, my cake is pretty awesome so I thought I would share it with you.

Preparation

• wash your hands
• check and make sure you have all the ingredients
• check and make sure you have all the equipment
• make sure you have permission

Equipment

• mixing bowl
• wooden spoon
• table spoon
• cup
• small sized pan
• medium sized pan
• large sized pan

Ingredients

6 dessert spoons of butter (melted)

2 cups of sugar

2 cups of self raising flour

4 table spoons of cocoa

4 eggs

1 cup of milk

3 drops of vanilla essence/extract

1 cup of choc chips

1/4 cup of cocoa

Recipe

1. Preheat the oven to 180c.
2. Put the sugar and flour into the bowl.
3. Break eggs on top and mix.
4. Pour the melted butter, milk and vanilla into the cake.
5. Beat all ingredients together for 3 minutes.
6. Pour 1/3 of mixture into the medium sized lined cake pan.
7. Put cocoa into the rest of the mixture and mix well.
8. Pour 1/2 of the chocolate mixture into the biggest pan.
9. Add chocolate chips to the rest of the chocolate mixture and stir.
10. Pour the rest into the smallest pan.
11. Place in the oven and pan for 45 minutes or until cooked.
12. Remove from the oven and cool in pan for 5 minutes.
13. Ice with chocolate icing.

Construction

• Get the biggest layer and cover the top and sides with icing.
• Place the medium size cake on top and then put icing on it.
• Then place the smallest cake on top and put the icing on.

Safety

• Get help to get the cake in and out of the oven.
• Get help to cut the cake.

Clean Up

• Wash the dishes.
• Put everything away.

Eat and enjoy - this cake is totally AWESOME!

Sundays in my City #10 - Trek Training

This time in 2 weeks mum will be in Isurava, a village along the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea.  It will be the first day of an 8 day trek.  With the adventure so close, this weekend was mum's last opportunity to do some 'real' training with the rest of the group.  What that means it that we didn't get a chance to really see her all weekend!

Yesterday she walked almost 20km up, down and around Mt Macedon, followed by a shorter training session today of only 8km or so at the You Yangs.  Now we have been to both of these places and they really are beautiful but as mum explained, when you are trudging along with a backpack of stuff that weighs 15kg or more, it is really easy to just carefully put one foot ahead of the other instead of taking the time to look around and enjoy the beauty of the walk.  So that is what mum said, what we really think she meant to say is that she was too tired and exhausted to take many pictures!


Saturday at Mt Macedon

Sunlight and Smoke

Sunday at the You Yangs

On Top of the World

Next weekend, we might get to do something together and take photos, who knows?
Love AJ and Milla

PS - We figured that these photos would only be colourful if we were there exploring too!

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Costume Queen on Ice

Just before I went to bed last night, I remembered that it was costume day at ice-skating and I needed to be a Disney character.  It was an emergency.  What was I going to do?

It was time to raid the costume box.  I had a mermaid costume but I don't think mermaids would survive in an ice rink so that was no good.  The next choice was using the costume I had for halloween last year and say I was Cinderella.  That could work but I couldn't find the leotard, or anything suitable to wear with the skirt.

It was looking like it could be a catastrophe, but then I remembered I had a costume from the year before that I wore as a mad-hatter.  Sure it wasn't the traditional costume from Alice in Wonderland, but when it is late at night and you are running out of time, the fact that it still fit me was the most important part.  Now if only I could find the hat!

When I remembered that the hat was squished beyond repair and thrown out, I didn't know what to do.  Luckily mum found a hat that fit and decorated it for me.  It was all was going to be OK.

Anyway, dramas aside.  I managed to have a good sleep to be ready for costume day at ice skating.

Here we are, all dressed up as a favourite Disney character.

There was a Snow White, Rapunzel, Cinderella and even Jesse from Toy Story, having our photo taken before we began our lesson.

And here I am, the Mad Hatter - the winner of the best costume on ice!

I won a book about the Disney on Ice production that will be in Melbourne this holiday, when I will be in Yarrawonga.  Luckily I had a great Disney on Ice day today!
Love Princess George

Sundays in my City #9 - Not going to plan

A long weekend in Australia is the perfect opportunity to get out and about with the kids and have some fun.  For the first time in what felt like forever we had a weekend with no sport and no training obligations at all.  The only plans we had were to look after my gorgeous little God son on the Saturday night.  The theory was that we would have a quiet day on Saturday, pottering around the house but then on Sunday we would go exploring.  The weather was predicted to be fairly decent, well at least not raining or freezing, so we were thinking that we would even find somewhere to stay overnight and really explore somewhere new.  That was the plan but like all good plans, they seem to get turned upside down.

The reality was that we did spend Saturday pottering about and then the rest of the day was spent playing with a gorgeous little bub.  I didn't expect to get much sleep Saturday night, what with having a 7 month old who doesn't sleep through the night the house, but surely that wouldn't be too bad.  When the beautiful bub did eventually fall asleep for the night, he only woke once.  Unfortunately though, I had the lack of sleep trifecta - a waking baby, followed by insomnia and then a sick child.  I managed to only doze for a an hour or so with my night being spent re-settling the baby, cleaning up vomit and calming a sick child.

Needless to say, with the extreme of lack of sleep, I was in no state to do any exploring on Sunday.  In fact AJ and I barely moved from the couch all day long.  Instead of photos of awesome adventures, I have photos of a beautiful bub and my beautiful girl.

A bath in the Kitchen Sink

Beautiful Babes

I was so grateful that my beautiful girl loves him almost as much as I do and was happy to help out.

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Grrr, Argh!

Way back in the last school holidays, at Easter, there was a big storm and during that snapped our television antenna and now we can't watch tv.  It really isn't a huge problem because we have about a billion dvds that we can watch instead, and then there is hours of fun watching random stuff on You Tube.

[source]

In the lack of traditional tv watching, we have found some awesome stuff to watch.  Our first new family favourite is Punky Brewster.  Punky is really cool.  Milla love it because she wears really cool clothes, has a dog and great friends.  I love it because it is fun to watch.

[source]

Now that we have watched all of the Punky Brewster episodes available, we needed to watch something new.  After heaps of begging, mum and dad broke all of their own rules and gave in.  They let us watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It was really cool but kind of scary, so we didn't watch too much of it.

Well that was until today...

Last night I was sick and woke up during the night to vomit, over and over again.  It was pretty ugly and exhausting too.  I was so exhausted that I didn't leave the couch all day.  Mum who stayed up all night with me was pretty tired too, so we snuggled on the couch and watched Buffy all day long!

As much as snuggling on the couch snuggling is the best way to spend the day when you aren't feeling so well, I hope that I am feeling better so that I can enjoy a holiday outside tomorrow.
Love AJ Pickle  

Baking with Colour

Last night one of my best friends came here for a sleep over.  Her dad came to pick her up in the morning but we convinced him to let her stay because we had really important things to do.  Luckily he said yes and to celebrate, we made cookies.  The best thing about making cookies is eating them.  The second best thing about making them is that as they are cooking, we get more time to play - the perfect delaying tactic!

We used one of my favourite cookie recipes - 100s of biscuits.  The recipe literally makes hundreds of biscuits if you don't eat all of the dough!  I think we ate more than we cooked.  Because the mixture makes so many, we all got to choose our own variations.  AJ and mum made choc-chip cookies.  We would have taken photos of them if they weren't devoured in 3.2 seconds.

We decided that we wanted plain biscuits but wanted to add some variety.  When I say variety, what I really mean is COLOUR.  How awesome do they look?

They are pretty delicious too!
Love Princess George

Surprises for Everyone

Today was a school day, but there was no school.  All of the teachers are stopping work to try to make sure that they are given the opportunity to keep being great teachers.  That and a whole lot of other reasons that we really don't understand.   

Waiting for the tram.

Anyway, the best thing about not having to go to school was that we could have a surprise adventure in the city.  

The first surprise was meeting up with Aunty Sharn and Billy, they didn't know that we weren't at school and they weren't expecting to see us.  The next surprise was when Nan and Pop got off the train and were super excited to see ALL of us.  

We had the whole day to hang out together.  It was pretty cold, so instead of doing our usual stuff, exploring parks and gardens, we decided to go to the museum.  

Kids on the moon

It has been forever since we have been to the museum and it was even more awesome than I remembered.  There was so many cool places to explore that I didn't even get time to show Billy where the kids part of the museum was.  

I wanted to stay at the museum all day long but everyone was starting to get hungry so we headed back to the city to have a late lunch.  

Eventually the day was almost over and it was time for Nan and Pop to catch the train back home.  Even if it was a busy day, it was great to spend the day with so many awesome people.

Billy's big kisses :-)

Oh and a big smoochy kiss for your birthday Aunty Sharn!

Love AJ and Milla

Sundays in my City #8 - Climbing High

Thanks to Unknown Mami, our mum is trying to make sure that we do something fun each week so that we have some photos to share for Sundays in my City.  

Sunday is Soccer Day around here.  So we were up at stupid o'clock to go to the other side of the city for Milla to play soccer.  We were lucky it was an early game, it started to rain just as we headed for the car!  Of course, because it began to rain, that cut short our plans for spending the rest of the morning in the park.  Instead we headed to DFO South Wharf to get new shoes.  Mum stopped at Anaconda to get new trekking boots and we managed to convince her that we should go rock climbing on the indoor tower there.  Surprisingly enough, mum agreed (perhaps because the hiking boots she found were $80 cheaper than she expected! and before you know it, the 3 of us were climbing high. 

Climbing high

Like this Dad!

I dunno about this!

What am I doing up here?

Can we go again?

And we are on the way down!

 Mum decided to stay on the ground and get photos, we think that is mainly because she is chicken!

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