willow tree babes

your mum and i just used to love to make stuff. we could spend hours wandering around finding things that we could turn into treasures! at my place, on the farm, we had a but willow tree on the round-about. we would tear the small bendy branches off, then strip the leaves from thenm and weave them into bangles and head wreaths. (sometimes this beautiful willow jewellery would make it into our shops!) one day we decided to make entire outfits from the willow tree. we wove the branches into belts and hung leafy branches from them to turn them into beautiful willowy hula skirts! that day it was your mum and charlie and me. the three of us stood out there on the round about, beneath the willow tree, for hours and hours putting together enchanted forest fairy outfits. we stayed out there perfecting out latest fashions until the sun went down. i seem to remember some discussion about doing a show for the adults (PG, nelly, murray and gen) but there was one slight problem. when the sun goes down on the farm, the mozzies come out. and all those nasty bugs were attracted to our beautiful leafy skirts! and they buzzed around us and the leaves were scratchy and we were pretty uncomfortable all 'round!! we stuck to making bangles after that day - willow tree skirts were not a good idea!!

nite nite, sleep tite!! don't let the willow tree buggy bugs bite!

love you all! xxx

she-ra cookies.

two of the things that your mum and i really loved when we were kids were she-ra and cooking. so, when your mum got a she-ra cookbook we just couldn't wait to try a recipe.

one day when i was at greenvale, your mum and i decided to make cookies from the she-ra cookbook. along with things like butter, sugar, eggs and flour, the recipe called for a pinch of salt.

so we added a pinch of salt. then another pinch of salt. then another pinch of salt. man, we put so much salt into our cookie mixture!!

when the cookies came out of the oven and it was time to try them we couldn't even eat one each. turns out that salty cookies are pretty disgusting. even she-ra ones!

stuck in the mud (two)

sometimes, when your mum would come to my house on the farm to play we would get bored. we'd grizzle to my um (nellie), "mu-um, we're bo-ored!". and she would always say the same thing. "go play outside. it's a beautiful day - why don't you go for a walk?"

well, on this particular day we did decide to go for a walk. we decided we'd walk along the track to the dairy. now, all along the track there were paddocks for the cows. and in each paddock was a little shelter. the cows never went in the shelters - i don't even know why they were there. they were just full of mud, mud, mud.

do you know what an occy strap is? it's a piece of elastic rope with plastic coated hooks on the ends. you can use occy straps to tie things down to the roof of your car, or the back of your bike.

or... you can use occy straps to play "i dare you to go into the mud and pick up that occy strap!" and your mum and i really liked to play that game. (if you don't have an occy strap, you can also use a stick!)

anyway, on this day when we were walking by all the paddocs on the track to the dairy, we had an occy strap and we were spinning it and flinging it and taking it in turns to go and pick it up. we thought that one of the particularly mud, mud, muddy shelters would add a nce challenge to our game.

the mud was thing and sticky and our gumboots would squelch and burp as they sank deeper. we would laught and squeal and pull each other out. "i dare you to go into the mud and get the occy strap!" really was a fun game!

now, on THIS day i don't remember who's turn it was to pick up the occy strap. i don't remember who was in the shelter first. all i remember is that we BOTH wound up in that thick and sticky muddy mud and we were both STUCK. for real. we just couldn't get our gumboots out. at least not with out feet still inside!! there was only one thing to do. we had to tak our feet out of the gumboots. we stepped into that ooey, gooey, thick, sticky, muddy mud with just our socks on and reach down into it to pull our gumboots out. with the help of some sticks and some good luck we got those boots out, but wow - what a MESS!! our poor socks looked like sludge monsters! luckily for us there were also water troughs in the paddocks for the cows to drink from. we waddled over to the trough to wash out our mud covered socks and boots... then took our wed muddy selves home to nellie.

i don't think we played "i dare you to go into the mud and get the occy strap" again after that!!

i love you all!

nitey nite, sleep tite... xxx

shop til you drop

your mum and i were a pair of pretty creative kids when we were growing up. we used to make up all sorts of fun to keep us amused. you'll hear lots of stories about the games we made up (like the time we hid our undies!) one of our favourite things to do was make shops. making shops was fun AND helped us earn money - two awesome things in one!! we'd sell all sorts of things in our shops. sometimes we'd have our toys in the shops, or pictures we'd drawn. and we loved to make jewellery from willow trees - that was always a pretty good seller. but our most ingenious scheme was selling shiny one cent pieces for two cents!! we thought this was a pretty good idea. a pretty good money maker. all we had to do was get our hands on some shiny one cent pieces! we wanted lots for our shop! well, gus turned out to be pretty big help there - he had lots of shiny one cent pieces and he gave them all to us. turns out gus was a pretty good shopper too. after browsing in our shop he bought all those one cents pieces for two cents each! who knows, maybe he's still got some of those shiny coins!!

nitey nite, sleep tite. xxx

undies in the sand

every mothers day your mum's family, and my family, and some of our cousins would go to the river somewhere for a picnic. we'd have a fire, take walks through the bush, move rocks around in the river to make dams, dig holes in the sandy river banks until we struck water, go fishing and swim. there was always a tarzan rope to swing from into the river - your mum was really good at that, but usually i wasn't brave enough.

one mothers day, when we were really little, we were at the river in murchison for our picnic. we decided, your mum and i, to bury our undies. we thought it might be fun to hide them and find them again. as it turns out, when you bury your own undies they're not very difficult to find. and therefor, the game actually isn't that fun. but we perservered. we would challenge ourselves by walking away from the hiding places for longer and longer, but no matter what we did those undies just wouldn't stay hidden. we couldn't outsmart ourselves. we were just too clever!

we walked away from our buried undies in the end. and would you believe that when nelly and gen told us it was time to go home we couldn't find our undies!! success!! we'd actually managed to hide them from ourselves! we never did find those undies. and we never tried to hide our undies from ourselves again.

i love you all.. nitey nite.. xxx

stuck in the mud (one)

when i was born, pg and nellie lived on "oakridge park" - the farm. i pretty much hated living on the farm at the time, but now some of my best memories are there. often we would have picnics at the swamp. the swamp was like a small channel that ran through the farm. we had a big plantation of trees that my grandparents (barbie and geoff) planted along the swamp. and in a clearing in the plantation pg built a big picnic table and a bbq. we'd have a fire, we'd climb trees, and sometimes we'd put the canoe in the water and try to tip ourselves out - accidentally on purpose.

one day when we were at the swamp for a bbq, jess, charlie, your mum and i went for a walk along the swamp. right at the very end, the swamp got very narrow and there was no water in it. it just turned into gray mud. it looked rock solid - like concrete. we wanted to get to the other side so one by one we took a big step or a jump over the narrowest part of the swamp. but your mum decided to just walk straight across the had mud. but there was one little problem - the mud wasn't hard at all. it was thick and sticky and your mums foot went straight in and kept going all the way up to her knee!! she was stuck, stuck, stuck! we pulled her out and then had to dig her shoe out. she was wearing her blue bubble-gummers that day. i loved those shoes! anyway, we crossed back over the icky sticky ooey gooey mud and went back to the bbq. your mum washed out her shoe and sock all covered in mud then put them on a stick and held them over the fire like she was cooking a piece of damper. we laughed and laughed and from then on we all thought it was a good idea to check 'hard' mud with a stick first - just incase is wasn't hard mud but icky sticky ooey gooey mud like that day on the farm.

love you all. nitey nite.. xxx

bubbles in the bath

when your mum was first born murray and gen lived at "greenvale" the orchard. that's where your mum and charlie and gus lived when they were kids. we used to have so much fun there - we'd hide among the pear trees, swim in the pool, climb the mulberry tree - all sorts of things!

one night, after a busy and tiring day outside, your mum and i got in the bath. the kids bathroom had one of those baths that had a shower in it and a glass shower screen all around it. so we closed the glass and instead of running the bath tap we ran the shower to fill the bath. we put in our favourite bubble bath - strawberry shortcake! YUM! we'd take it in turns to sit under the shower rose. every time we moved around to get under the shower the water would slosh all around but we wouldn't even notice. we had so many bubbles all around us and the shower coming down and it was so much fun! but then gen came in and she didn't sound like she was having as much fun as we were. when we opened the shower glass to see her we saw that the water from our bath had just overflowed EVERYWHERE! it was all over the bathroom floor and had even gone out into the hall and soaked the carpet. oh man! murray pulled up a bit of the carpet and propped it up on pencils. he directed a fan onto it so it would dry. gen gave your mum and i towels, and still covered in bubbles we got down on the floor with all those towels and mopped up all the water.

we were really careful after that not to ever overflow the bath tub again!

love you all.. nitey nite.. xxx