We're back...

...and I bet you didn't even know we were gone, rofl! Too funny :)

Bright and early Wednesday morning, we drove to Dubbo Zoo to spend the night in a tent, admittedly a 5 star tent with tiled floor, beautiful beds and great ensuite, but still a tent! We also got three behind the scenes tours of the zoo, which were just awesome! Tony and I did Zoofari about 12 years ago and loved it then too.

Here are some photos

That's me being silly in a cafe in Dubbo. We visited the Dubbo Gaol while we were there, that was cool, although a little bit freaky. Mary wouldn't go in one of the buildings, she flatly refused. I wonder if she might be a sensitive soul? She also lost one of her teeth while eating her caramel tart in this cafe.


Can you guess what that is? An elephant's tongue! A few photos later I had elephant snot all over me! Her name was YumYum and when she said hello to us, she snotted everywhere!


OMGosh this is the beautiful creature that we got to feed carrots to for breakfast. The previous night, we also got a very closeup look at them from our bus, one of them poked her head in through the bus windows. Amazing!


I just love this pic, the keeper was patting her under her neck and she was stretching out and enjoying it. I think she looks like a toothless old lady.


This is cheeky Peggy at the Cowra Japanese Tea Gardens. It was just beautiful! Peggy was in a surprisingly good mood considering she had scraped the skin from her knee and elbow when she fell off her bike riding around the zoo. This morning she was told to go and wash her face before school, when we realised it was more scrapings and a big bruise on her chin!


This is Billy, who insisted on climbing to the top of the mountain, we let him do it by himself, lol. Okay it's tiny and you can't see him, he's standing above the middle green bush up in the top middle of the photo.

All in all, except for the long, long drive, it was an awesome trip. An expensive one, but certainly worth it for the close encounters with the animals.

New ATCs

Here are the ATCs I have been working on:

This is for an African swap using papers from the October A la Tarte.


This one is for an ATC calendar swap. Tree by justjohanna, calendar by Purple Onion Designs.


This one was my prototype but I went a bit too far and added some stitching in the top corner and around the calendar. It just didn't do it for me! So I covered the corner with more paper and stamped the birdhouse image on another piece of paper and attached it over the top. Not a perfect save, but better than tossing it in the bin. All images on this one are by justjohanna.

Now onto the 13 calendar pages that I have to have done and at the swap organiser's house by the 1st November!

Nearly there

The end of the school holidays, that is. We haven't done anything major, just lots of little bits and pieces.

Thanks for the replies on Mary. We had a paediatrician's appointment yesterday and have an appointment with the specialist in about 10 days. We have a couple of gorgeous new cookbooks too.

Me, well I've just signed up for an online painting workshop! LOL what have I done?! Oh well it should be fun. I've also been busy making ATCs and calendars. What was I thinking when I signed up for the swaps!

Mmmmm well as I'm at a loss as to what to blog about right now, I best make it short...

Oh hang on! Brag coming up - I got three magazines in the mail last week and I'm in all of them, lol. I got the November issue of Papercrafts and also the last two issues of Australian Papercrafts.

Okay that's it now, nothing else ;)

School holidays and other stuff

We're nearly halfway through the school holidays. We haven't really done a lot. Monday was a public holiday so we did venture out to Borders Bookstore and the Pancake Parlour.

While we were at Borders, I grabbed a Gluten Free cookbook as we are about to undergo some major life changes in our household. Mary has been suffering from a sore tummy for a long, long, long time. We initially went to the doctor last year sometime, maybe even the year before. Then it was put down to her being a little stressball, which she is. But it continued and started getting worse. So in April this year we started tests. First it was fingerpricks, then blood tests, then more bloodtests, then ultrasounds. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Then it was mentioned that perhaps it was psychological. Well that's a blow to my ego that I could be turning my 7 year old into a little fruitcake, lol.

All the while, I'm thinking that she was hungry, or not hungry, or constipated, or nervous etc etc. Then one day a catalogue arrived in the mail and mentions coeliac disease and lists the symptoms. Mary didn't have all of the symptoms, but a lot of them. So I call the doctor to see if she had been tested for it, and believe it or not - she hadn't?! So off we trek again, but this time he tries to tell us she is constipated so give her prunes every day *sigh*. I nearly begged, and he gave in and we got the tests done. Two weeks later, not sure why it took that long, but they called us. The receptionist calls us "the doctor wants to see you", "but why", "I'm not at liberty to say". Are you serious?! Anyway, yes her blood levels are hugely positive for coeliac disease, but we can't change her diet just yet, we now need to have a bowel biopsy done. More waiting lists....

It's very, very hard to make a sandwich or give your child a biscuit when you know that it is basically poisoning them :(

But good news is, we now have her diagnosed and it's treatable through diet and not medication. So once that biopsy is done, I have to learn to read food labels and change the way we cook.

justjohanna forum

Forgot to mention this in my last post.