House Hunting

We decided to buy a home. Well, I decided that a really long time ago, it just took a while to get Purple on board with the idea ;)

My dream is to find some large lot, at least 25 acres, with a live-able house, and room to build a few cabins or put caravans, yurts, tipis, etc and have a kind of mini-community. I want to have lots of lush rainforest, sweet water to drink and swim in, and people to come live with us. Purple would rather be in town, and Littletree doesn't care as long as we can be near her friends. Hopefully we can find something that will work for all of us.

We looked at so many places this week my head is spinning from them all! It's keeping me very busy anyway, talking with real estate agents, trawling the property listings, going to look at houses and land.

First there was the block over the road from where we live now - it has a run-down cabin, three times the size of our house now, and gets rental income from a cafe at the front of the block. cons? It's only 10 acres, and has no permanent water source; just rain tanks. It's very affordable though.

Then we looked at a place a few minutes further up the road from us. It's on 24 acres of rainforest bush, with spring water (no swimming hole or creek though), and a really gorgeous house.

Cons? The land is all thickly forested and steep - not really any useable land for anything, so no room for other people to come and live there. Which means we can't afford it.

We saw another place a little further up the road. 25 acres of pristine rainforest land, with a small creek and a cabin. The land is absolutely beautiful, but the cabin would need a LOT of work to make it inhabitable - the deck and 3rd bedroom have rotted away, and there's a tree growing up through the bathroom.

Still, the cabin could be fixed up, and there's a fantastic flat house site just a little way down the hill that we could build on, as well as a couple of other spots that could host caravans or yurts. It's also very affordable. Cons? it needs loads of work, we'd have to put a lot of money into fixing it up and it's bordering on "too far" from town.

There's the compromise place; a really 'nice,' new, 3 bedroom house 2 acres on the outskirts of town. Purple really likes the house, though I find it to be characterless. The back of the property is a small pocket of beautiful bush land with some massive old-growth trees, and there's about an acre of cleared space below the house. cons? we couldn't really do much in the way of having people live with us, and about a quarter of the land is an unusable wetland gully.

We even looked at a few of places in town. Nice little suburban blocks with neat suburban houses.

There's still loads to look at; today we're going to see a place on the other side of town; 100 acres with a gorgeous wooden house on it. I did find the dream place already; 235 acres of old rainforest, with creeks, springs and waterfalls. It would be perfect. Only we can't afford it on our own. Anyone have a spare $300K and we can buy it together!

 

Wild Life

Yesterday we went with my sister, Chicky and her boyfriend, S up the Gold Coast to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary.

Littletree had a fantastic time, looking at all the animals.

We saw cute Koalas, though we have plenty of them right here at home, so it's not so exciting.

Chicky and Littletree got to pose with a carpet python, but again, we have loads of much bigger carpet pythons right here at home to play with!

Less common were the crocodiles, conveniently located right next to the crocodile warning signs. These signs were so ubiquitous when we went up to Cairns.

These little lizards were everywhere; even out in the parking lot:

We rode the miniature train around a few times, which Littletree absolutely loved, but of course, her little butt fit in the seats, unlike mine ;)

We also caught one of the live shows with birds of prey, which was very cool

Of course, I took almost 100 pictures (97 to be precise), so the hardest part of the journey was deciding which ones to delete, and which to post on my blog! Here's Chicky checking out an emu:

When Littletree started getting tired, we decided to get rid of her, but it didn't quite work out ;)

Sadly, Chicky and S finished their visit with us; they're spending a couple of nights in some fancy Gold Coast hotel, and then flying home. It was really great to see them, and have a catch-up with my sister, whom I've not seen for a year, even though it got a bit crowded in our tiny cottage, with me, Purple, Lush, Littletree, Chicky and S!

Little Sister

My little sister, Chicky came up for a visit this week with her boyfriend S. Only my little sister isn't so little anymore!

I left home when Chicky was only 10, so I still remember her like that, even though she's an adult now. Littletree is ecstatic to see her aunt as well!

Poor S! for some reason, after having the most wonderful sunny weather since we came back from Cairns, it started raining the day they arrived, and the leeches are out in force! Somehow they seem to like S.

We've been mostly taking it easy, Chicky and S took Littletree for a day to Byron Bay, to hang out and do some touristy stuff while Lush, Purple and I went to a spa to celebrate Lush's birthday.

Yesterday we went for a drive to The Channon craft markets, stopping for a photo op at Minyon Falls on the way there.

The market was fun, the sun came out, and I had a good dance.

Littletree made a candle too, dipping a wick in and out of different coloured vats of wax to make a rainbow coloured taper.

Here's the finished product:

After everything is back to normal, I've so gotta get back into studying! I've got new midwifery books on order that I can't wait to work on :)

Lush Adventures

It's so wonderful to have Lush home again :) We've been having a great time, doing all sorts of stuff and adventures.

We went to Crystal Castle, which is a kind of wonderful faerie garden full of huge crystals. Littletree and her friend Annasho chased each other round the labyrinth,

we strolled through the grounds, past Buddhas and Hindu Gods, and absorbed the peaceful energy of crystals.

Littletree is really fascinated with crystals, she's starting a collection of them, and spends hours playing with them, and discussing their energies.

I also gave Lush another haircut.

Funny how it suits her so well having short hair, when we were all used to her having incredibly long hair before (Lush, FKA Rapunzel, used to have thigh-length hair).

Tomorrow is Lush's birthday, but since my sister is coming for a visit, we're going to celebrate on Friday.

Big City Adventure

Lush came home this weekend! :D It's so wonderful to have all the family here. We drove up to Brisbane to pick her up, which is about 2 hours' away. The plan was to go to the museum as well so Littletree can see dinosaur bones; she's been really interested in dinosaurs recently.

After a long drive, and getting lost in the confusing maze of freeways and overpasses in central Brisbane, we finally found the park where we were to meet Lush, only to discover the park crawling with police, all taped off as there had been a murder! We arrived just in time to see the police taping off the area, and covering the body with a sheet.

Pretty freaky! So we didn't hang around there, but hot-footed it straight to the museum.

Littletree did get to see some cool dinosaur bones, which was great.

We had a great time walking around, looking at all the exhibits. They have some really interesting stuff there. Even a Littletreeasaurus and a Lushosaur!

I think one of the coolest things was this huge exhibit they have with loads of animals all lined up so you can see the sizes of them.

I was also interested to see scientific proof that children do not belong in schools:

See! Fish survive by schooling, and Humans survive by intelligence and dexterity. Schools are for fish, not children!

Ballerinas

We went to a friend's house this week so Littletree could join in a homeschooling art class. Of course, the art class went well, but after about 20 minutes the kids got distracted and gave up on painting to do dance performances.

The did a few practices and then made a show.

We had a lot of fun, and it looks like the art class will be a weekly event :)

Sparkle Garden

Littletree had her friend Annasho sleep over a few times this week, which has been lots of fun. The girls kept each other entertained for the most part, playing all kinds of fun games, mostly involving dress-ups and princesses.

In the evening, I went outside, only to see a beautiful sparkle garden twinkling in the starlight.

It's really hard to get the full effect on camera, but the entire front steps and lawn area were coated in sparkles. It turned out Littletree and Anasho had sprinkled out the whole glitter jar - a peanut butter jar that was full of all colours of glitter mixed together.

In the daylight the next morning I managed to take some better pics, but still, the full effect is lost.

The front steps:

The lawn:

Really, the entire front lawn is coated in glitter like this now. It's fantastically beautiful. Of course, I could have gotten angry with them for 'wasting' the glitter, but I reminded myself that the glitter was Littletree's to use as she wants, and it's not really wasted. The garden does look like a fairy glen, and the girls really enjoyed sprinkling it.

There's no way that glitter is going anywhere for a good long while. and of course, since we walk in and out all the time, the glitter is getting spread over the whole house!

Princess Play

Littletree has been playing some wonderful games lately. She's been making a magic book, which is a notebook she's decorating. There are pages with collage, stickers, silver ribbons, stickers, glitter, pins, fuzzy things, random craft supplies... all sorts of stuff.

Every page is different, and they're all amazing. Some of the pages have text that Littletree dictated to me, some she wrote, some have 'invisible' writing.

Here's one of the pages; she dripped food colouring onto the page and then blew it with a straw to get a splattered effect. then added glue and glitter.

It's a very complicated recipe for making a magic potion that will help the faeries to have their sparkles, destroy the evil goblins and fly with magic.

Littletree has been working on making this potion for weeks. It started with tracing the outline of her feet on some card, and cutting them out. then painting them pink, covering them with glue, and soaking them in a bowl of water for about a week. then the paper feet were dried out, and the water had food colouring, white paint, and a lot of glitter added to it.

The potion was then left to sit for another week, then more stuff added. it had to be decanted into various different containers, then frozen. then melted, poured to other containers, had more stuff added (mostly pink colours and glitter). frozen again, melted again. and so on.

Last week she soaked an apple in the potion, which was to be a special poisoned apple. the apple would be good food for faeries, but would kill any evil goblins.

When she's waiting for the potion to brew, there's always miniature tea parties:Aren't they cute!?