Bla-Blah .. or anything but

Tonight, we had a Dinner of Awesomeness (tm). Last night was a Dinner of Almost-Awesomeness .. but tonight I apparently nailed it :D

Last night: Fusilli with Broccolini and Chilli
Tonight: Fusilli with Broccolini, Sundried Tomatoes and Chilli (with tomato paste)

For the win. For the win, I tell you.

Annnyways.

The last couple of weeks have been fairly action packed in our house and it's been really cool :)

Batty's dad and brother came to visit for a night - great to see them and even better to see Cody warm to them so quickly. By virtue of them staying, we also finalised the last step of getting Grunge's "Big Girl Bed" purchased - the mattress :) We're now all set to go for when we eventually pull her out of the "Almost Big Girl Bed" and reorganise her room *excited*.

I've been back to the gym for my second PT session. Still enjoying it immensely, though I really need to find more time to go during the week - I'd like to go at least twice a week in some capacity.

We bought a new washing machine - finally! This one's a 10kg sucker, so what would normally take 4-5 loads, now takes 1-2, thereby (hopefully) saving a bit of water even though it's bigger. Now we just need to get the dryer onto the wall and we're done. In conjunction with the new washing machine, we made the purchase of a TiVo. Happy days - who the hell needs payTV when there's *this* much random stuff on free to air?? I couldn't imagine having enough time to watch everything TiVo's recording for me, let alone having iQ and paying for hours and hours and hours of stuff I couldn't ever watch.

And onto our biggest news of August so far. Batty printed our first demo card of the new business. We're now just waiting on one of the products to be reprinted and she's all set to go live. This is ultimately the culmination of nearly 12 months of effort on her behalf and I'm so incredibly proud we've come this far. Anything from here on in, in my eyes, is a success. Whether it changes our lives or not, it could mean the difference between life and death for one of our customers and that's what's important.

Our next biggest news is just Grunge in general :) She's such a big girl now - so independent and clever! On Sunday at swimming, Little Miss Independent wanted to spend the whole lesson swimming on her own. Even to the point where she could barely even hold herself above water *laugh* NOOOOOOO, she says. And then promptly goes under the water, even with a flotation backpack :P Good work kiddo *laugh*.

As I mentioned last month, she's learning to count. She's even more consistently counting to 10 and yesterday we discovered she can actually count to 20. Our best guess is that they're being taught that at daycare because she convincingly counted all the way. Go Grungeon :D She also nearly wrote her name on Saturday night - a distinctive "d" and "a" and enough characters after it to make the full "Dakota" almost appear. Woot :)

I'm sure there's much more to tell .. it's past my bedtime though!

It's life Gym, but not as we know it ..

Something else to add for last month .. I joined a gym :)

I'd been talking about it long enough and putting it off long enough (excuses excuses) but I've finally done it now. I also signed myself up for three personal trainer sessions and my trainer isn't full on hard core, so that's a bonus. At the moment, I'm enjoying pushing myself because I want to push myself, not because there's someone yelling incessantly at me.

Admittedly, my first session resulted in a broken Emsie (no bones!) so I'll need to accompany my gym time with physio time for my ankle and now also my left thigh for whatever I did the other day. Ah well .. all part of the experience is it not? :)

Joooo-Lie!

What a massive, massive month!

I went to Sydney twice for work .. in a good way :)

The first time was an emerging leaders workshop which was part of a study run by a consulting group, based on Hogan Assessments. Fairly interesting and really interesting to see how our profiles stacked up against executives included in the study.

The second time was for a workshop about leading talent - mandatory training for managers at work. Was about the 5th time I went through my Hogan profile, however it was good to put it into this context. Even cooler was doing the training with my mentor and being able to take some of the information into our sessions.

Best part about going to Sydney? Well, aside from BEING in Sydney.. Staying with Sparky, Sar and Dash :D

Life outside of work is gearing up as well. Batty's moving the new business forward at a rate of knots and we're fairly excited about everything :) Grungeon is starting to exert her authority as a 2 year old. She's still a really good kid and hell fun to be around, she's just significantly more independent now, which is cute to watch :)

Grunge has started singing everything we sung to her up until now. They're all the classics :P

Baa Baa Black Sheep, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Open Shut Them, Old McDonald Had A Farm, The Wheels On The Bus, Roly Poly. You know the ones ;)

She can also fairly consistently count to ten. Sometimes she needs prompting for a few of the numbers, otherwise we end up with 3,4,5,9 as her effort *laugh*.

Grunge has also moved into what shall now be referred to as an "Almost Big Girl Bed". We took the sides off her cot and put on a single sized quilt (complete with Iggle Piggle quilt cover set). Massive success so far. Our little girl is the one who's excited to get into the night time routine. She gets medicine, then a story, then bed (with Daisy, Pink Cat, Piddle [Iggle Piggle], Puppy, Puppy, Puppy, Bear, Bird [Big Bird] and sometimes Dora or another baby though those tend to get confiscated overnight because they're FREAKY to see instead of Cody). If any of the routine (or bed friends) aren't right, we have a 2 year old moment before bed :P

That's about it for now .. move along people, nothing to see here ;)

Happy EOFYS

Happy EOFYS, EOFYS, EOFYS!

.. and Grunge turns 2

The 27th of June yielded us a birthday party :) We were a bit slow off the mark in organising it, but once we got some momentum it all came together with a big thanks to Batty.

Shortly before Grunge's birthday, we got word that our favourite Sar and Dash were coming to town to celebrate the occasion from Thursday to Monday! Unbeknownst to our favourite Sar and Dash, we knew that our favourite Sparky was coming in on Saturday morning and leaving with them on Monday :D Happy days for a bloody brilliant weekend in the making!

The weekend turned out to be absolutely killer. In a good way, of course! :)

We had a massive amount of work to get the house in shape for the number of people we'd invited to the party and it involved some fairly late nights in the lead up, but the house and backyard we ended up with were barely recognisable as ours :)

Sar and Batty spent a long Friday night getting the cakes baked and then mostly Sar and Batty put them together with fondant decorations right as the party was starting. Bloody fantastic work guys!

The party itself was a good laugh. It was awesome to finally see a lot of the people we'd invited and Grunge had a ball. We had a bouncy castle in the backyard which the kids went a bit mental on (including airborne launches across the verandah area by our goddaughter!!). Grunge started the party with Fairy Bread in hand and finished the party with Fairy Bread in hand. She then continued to party until 9:30pm; 3.5 hrs past bedtime and MUCH longer than we expected she'd go for! *laugh*

It's always worst day ever to say see ya to Sar, Sparky and Dash but we all coped on Monday when they nicked off again. Having them stay (and vice versa) is like having family stay, but only the good bits :) Love every minute of it!

And, to make it even better, I've got trips to Sydney lined up for work this week .. I'll see them like, three times in one week!

Happy days *giggle*

Bird Goes Bowling

As part of a fundraiser for Starlight through work recently, the three of us went .. bowling ;)

We had the bumpers up so Grungeon stood a chance at having some fun - she is only little after all *grin*. At her insistence, Bird (her Big Bird stuffed toy) had to come along and it's lucky he did; Grunge was a a bit too afraid to bowl on her own!

At one point within the first few frames, if I dare admit it, Grunge and Batty were both beating me. At least I don't have to say Bird and Batty were beating me, which is even more appalling :P Bird didn't bowl as well as Grunge, but he sure held his own. By the end of it, Grunge had a fantastic time and couldn't wait to make Bird go bowling and then make Bird give us high 5's. Too cute enough and apparently we'll have to go again *grin*

Hogan's Heroes

Recently as part of a team thing at work, we all completed our Hogan Assessments. I'd like to say I'm massively surprised at the insight I got into my personality, but I'm not :P It's pretty much exactly what I knew, just on paper.

Interestingly, the MVPI element of it wasn't a surprise, however I sure couldn't have put it that clearly even if I'd thought about it. Very cool and very encouraging that the exact type of manager I want to be was reflected in the MVPI :)

Advance!

We have a mentoring program at work wherein 20 or so people are chosen to participate. I got nominated, filled in my form and wham bam, got myself a mentor :)

I have one of the general managers of one of our areas of business. She's been with the company in its greater sense for about 9 years and not a massively long time in my company itself. Enough people seem to have enough good to say about her that I'm quite excited about meeting her and getting on with this program :D