Oh brother!

Oh my goodness!!!  I have some serious catching up to do here!!!  I have pictures and stories and all sorts to tell.  So I think what I'll do is give you a few today, and hopefully a few more tomorrow and over the next few days.

Why am I bothering to catch up?  Well, because I think you guys are awesome for reading my blog so I want to continue to entertain you.  And because my friends and family who live a long way away say that they like to see and hear what we get up to, so I want to keep letting them into our lives.

So, here we go!

I am the oldest of four.  I love my siblings and, although we had our fair share of fights as we were growing up, we've always been friends as well.

At the start of the month we had the pleasure of having my brother stay with us.  He lives two states away - about 24 hours drive.  So it was awesome to see him.

He'd flown up and was staying with my sister in our old town, then caught the train to here.  The train was supposed to arrive at 2am but due to the heavy rains and a couple of trains breaking down he didn't get here until 6:30am (or something like that).

Sunrise while waiting for the my brother's train to arrive.

Unfortunately, we were all sick while he was here :(  We had head and chest colds so we ended up spending most of our time reading and watching movies and attempting to sleep.

But we also played some board games, did the shopping and just spent time talking.  And we were really quite happy with that!

The last day of his visit with us was my brother's birthday, so I attempted my first ever sponge cake!  Mum used to make sponges for our birthdays every year so it was fun to recreate the tradition.

The cake turned out great!  It was light and fluffy and delicious!  But I'd forgotten that Mum used to cut the cake in half horizontally, then put the jam and cream in the middle and ice the top.  The recipe makes two cakes though, so I put the jam and cream on the bottom cake (by the way, we'd bought low fat cream.  Turns out you can't whip low fat cream!  So I just poured it over the bottom layer and let it soak in a bit, then put the jam over that), then put the other cake on top of it and iced it.

The Little Big Fella decided he wanted us to put red icing on top.  Well, that icing just wouldn't turn red!!!  So after about half a bottle of red food colouring, I ended up adding some yellow to make it orange-ish.

Okay, fine!  It's pink!

So after a pretty quiet couple of days, it was time for my little bro to go.  The exciting thing is that I'll be seeing him in July when we go to the P!nk concert with my youngest sister!!!!  Woo hoo!!!!

About to say goodbye as the sun sets on the day and our visit.

Our next new adventure for the year actually happened in February!  We went to our first Race Day!

Last year the Big Fella was living here in the quarters and went with one of his classmates.  He called me up telling me how much fun he was having and that we should definitely go next year.

Well, this year he was working so I had to take the Little Big Fella instead :-D  They cater to kids and had a few rides and bits and pieces.  Initially the Little Big Fella was NOT interested!  The slide looked too big and he just wanted to be near me.

That didn't last too long!

And once he'd been on the slide, he had to go on the horses, then the rocket, then the jumping castle.  He had a ball!

Being new to races, I didn't realise there would only be 5 races for the whole afternoon.  But once the races started, the Little Big Fella and I got up to the fence and cheered everyone on, not caring a bit who won!  It was good fun!

There were heaps of people there too, including some of the Little Big Fella's friends, so we had a lovely afternoon.

The funny thing was when the police turned up and drove through the carpark.  Everyone who could see them kind of stopped what they were doing and watched them.  Then once the police left, it was as if someone had turned the music back on or something!

Hmmm, what else have we been up to?

Okay, one more for today.

This is one of our Rhode Island red chicken's eggs.  She lays her eggs in the dog house.  If I don't collect the egg very quickly after she vacates the dog house, the dog retaliates for being kicked out of her house by cracking (and sometimes eating) the egg.

At least the other chicken lays her eggs in the chicken house!