To Pink or not to Pink

Still trying to decide when to dye my hair pink. I am definitely going to dye it at some point, but I can’t work out if it would be better to do before or after the trip to Sydney. Here are the pros and cons.

PROS
1. Toddy is ready and waiting to have a day out in the city with me April 10th. I can get it done then as a birthday outing.
2. It would be pretty awesome to turn up to Sydney with pink hair.
3. My hair is disgusting right now and needs something done with it, pink or no pink. So perhaps it may as well be pink.
4. It would be a nice way to shake my Mum-itis.
5. I am highly suspicious that shortly pink hair will be a normal color to get. I know you think this is crazy!! But you wait! So I better get it done soon before that happens.

CONS
1. I can save the money from getting my hair done to spend at Brimfield – America’s largest antiques fair, which is happening in May.
2. My grandparents might have heart attacks seeing me with pink hair.
3. It might be nicer to have pink hair when I have also lost a bit of weight – it could be a weight loss incentive. And nothing is worse than a fat chick with pink hair, which is what I will be.
4. If the pink hair looks bad it will only increase my Mum-itis.
5. If I get it done too close to my 30th birthday everyone will think it is because I turned 30. Zzzz.
6. I am having difficulty deciding on what pink to get.

Advice? Now or later?

Ivytime

Ivy is so cute right now. Terrible at having her picture taken, but irresistibly cute. She has a tiny dimple and she’s started laughing now. She can roll onto her side but can’t make it all the way over. She is exactly average in weight, height and head, unlike Ralph “big head tiny body” Gerber. She weighs 12 pounds now. She’s grown out of her newborn clothes and is in 3M clothes now (I think this equates to 000 in Australia). It’s hard to tell since there isn’t much of it, but it looks like her hair is auburn. She looks great in apricot, purples, aqua – clothes which I associate with redheads – so I think she has that kind of redhead complexion. I still can’t work out what color her eyes are. Here are some photos I took of her recently. The white jumper she is wearing was knitted for her by her great-grandmother. The one of her with her eyes shut makes me so happy! Click on the little pictures to see them bigger. Enjoy your Ivytime!

Australia Trip To Do List

Besides the obvious (seeing friends and family), here are 20 things I have been daydreaming of doing when in Australia this June:

1. Going to see the Parra Eels play at home
2. Going to see the State of Origin game in Sydney (maybe? if we can get tickets and if anyone wants to go with us)
3. Watching the football on TV
4. Going to the Sydney Film Festival
5. Buying some more splayds, goodness knows where ours keep disappearing off to
6. Going op-shopping to find cool Aussie homewares
7. Eating a hot roast lamb roll at that amazing carvery on the way to Canberra
8. Browsing the antiques stores in Katoomba
9. Going to the zoo with Ralph
10. Taking Ralph to the Thomas the Tank Engine park (where he can ride on miniature trains)
11. Taking Ralph to the Wiggles Playland
12. Saying “oh it’s not even that cold” all the time when people complain about the weather
13. Talking to strangers EVERYWHERE I GO (no one does that here)
14. Lying on the grass out the front of my parent’s house when the weather is good
15. Getting the kids babysat!!!
16. Eating delicious Chinese food, Korean food, Indian food, Italian food, Persian food…
17. Getting a pair of ug boots
18. Going through my books I have in storage and picking out ones to bring back to the States
19. Going for walks around the Hills
20. Visiting Hillsong. I know it’s lame but I miss their music!

Have I missed anything?

IKEA at last

Pretty excited to be heading to IKEA tomorrow with my friend Patti (I met Patti through church – she is our pastor’s wife). I have needed to go since forever, since I sold the dresser out TV sat on, and our mirror, with the intent of buying new ones that we liked better…but never did. I feel like one of those people that sells a house before finding a new house and has nowhere to live. Except for me, it meant I had nowhere to check if my bottom looked fat in a pair of jeans.

Here is my shopping list this time round:

Clockwise from top left:
1. A crib mattress for Ivy. Ralph moved into a toddler bed this weekend, all because Ivy is too long for her bassinet (already!). Time for Ivy to go to a crib and for the bassinet to be sold on Craigslist.
2. The IKEA Stockholm cushion. I have loved these cushions for the longest time. I am very tempted to get 2 of them this time around.
3. The white STAVE mirror. Cheap, big, with just a thin plain white frame. Replacing our huge orange mirror that Jono never liked.
4. I really like the idea of this circle doona cover (“duvet”) for our room in the summer. I have two other covers I plan to sell at our upcoming seminary garage sale in exchange for this one.
5. Footstool for Ralph. Ralph really wants to climb up and look at things high up. I would rather him use a proper stool than be standing on chairs all the time.
6. Purple sheets. Because our bed looks so great with a white bedspread and dark sheets.
7. I am not going to get this pillow. It will not match our room I’ve decided. But I couldn’t be bothered re-doing the graphic.

Anyway, I will probably end up only getting the mattress, dresser and mirror. Still, it’s fun to dream! The thing I would love to buy most of all, but there is absolutely nowhere in our house for them to go, is this mirror that can be tiled:

Isn’t it so lovely? The tiles are either slightly golden or slightly rosey. But yeah, they wouldn’t really match anything in our apartment. Did you see the Ikea stockholm pillow on the bed there? These pillows are everywhere!

Here is a photo of that footstool painted. Doesn’t it look great?

Anyway, the trip is tomorrow and I can’t wait. It will be the fourth time since Ivy has been born that I have been out without the kids. I might even grab myself some meatballs!

Ralph loves to cook

Took some photos of Ralph making banana cake with Jono last week. Ralph loves helping us with jobs around the house – doing the washing, washing up, wiping the table, and putting things in the bin. But he loves cooking the most. He asks us if he can “tip?” and crack the egg – “egg…plop?” and of course, like any little kid “…taste?”.
Click on the photos to see them bigger.
Sorry I don’t have much time to write. Will post more updates of things we’ve been up to this weekend.

Ivy at 8 weeks

She still hasn’t decided on an eye color yet, but has worked out how to smile and make tiny baby noises. She has a tiny dimple that is very faint. Unfortunately she had a scratch on the top of her nose in these photos. Enjoy!

Ivy asleep at last…

Ivy’s “Indie Cool” room

I still don’t feel like it is “finished” because I never did find a chair and I am yet to hang her mobile, but here is a look into Ivy’s little “room”. She sleeps in our closet, actually. We figured for the first few months of her life while she is learning to sleep in the night it would be better for Ralph and in turn all of us if the two of them were separate.

Anyway, here is what her little closet looks like. Here are some views from the door. I am sorry the pictures are so lame, I really need to take a course on how to take photos of the inside of your house. It is really hard to take photos of such a small space also.

Here is my current chair set up. I don’t feed in it much because it is far comfier to feed her on the couch or in bed, but I do sit here for burping her or patting her when she wakes up in the night and isn’t hungry. The chair was “bought” from our living room, the rug for her room was “bought” from Ralph’s room (he had 2 of these rugs put together and for now he just has one), the bunny was the one toy I bought Ivy before she was born, the blanket was lovingly made by Kerryn and the footstool was bought for me by friends here who all pitched in.

This is what hangs above Ivy’s bed. My friend Aimee came over with two boxes of stuff I could borrow from her house for the room. Most of the stuff in here is borrowed from Aimee or taken from elsewhere in our house. I feel really proud of how little I actually bought. The two suitcases are filled with clothes for Ivy that are one size too big. I found that huge embroidery of animals for $10 at a local opshop.

This is what you see while sitting in the chair, what is next to the door. I put a tiny set of drawers here (what the doll and lamp are on top of), and above it a bunch of posters and postcards I had, a kind of “wall of indie cool”. There are two posters from Frankie magazine! Aimee lent me the deer lamp but it is very bright without a shade so I mostly just turn on the horse fairy lights for the middle of the night.

Besides her bassinet I spent about $50 – on a set of drawers from IKEA (which I can use later elsewhere), the picture, and the horse lights. Even her baby monitor I found at the Give and Take House on campus! My cheapest decorating job to date!

Up all night, time to read

Last night when I was struggling to get through an episode of terrible, terrible television while feeding Ivy I thought to myself…what did I used to do when I was by myself before study? Oh, that’s right, read!! As a result of this astounding brain wave I thought I’d check out the top 100 books of 2011 to see what I might have missed and might catch up on over the next few nights. Here are my picks of books that possibly sound half-decent. I have no idea whether or not they will actually be any good (I am just borrowing them from the library, so it’s not costing me anything if they aren’t) but thought you might like to check them out too? So here are my picks. If you click on the titles you can go read their synopses on Amazon.

1. 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami - this is definitely going to be good. Murakami is one of my top 5 favorite writers. However, this book is almost 1000 pages long, and if I start carting around a book that big, Jono is going to start asking why I am not reading War and Peace. Still, I will most certainly read this, if not now, then soon.

2. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything – Joshua Foer – a book about memory, and also an introduction to different ways to remember things. Could be useful for Greek. Did you know we spend 40 days of each year just trying to remember things we have forgotten? Eep!

3. The Tragedy of Arthur – Arthur Phillips – a novel about a lost Shakespearean play, possibly? A father claims to have found a copy of Shakespeare’s lost work about King Arthur and his dying wish is for his children to see it recognized. I think I just like Fakespeare. Is this akin to liking books that are Fake Pride and Prejudice books?

4. Mr Fox – Helen Oyeymi – this looks cute, has a great cover, and is about people going inside stories that they themselves are writing. Cool! Also I love books with Fox in the title – Lady into Fox etc.

New pictures of the new and expanded family!