Grandma Ormsby's Passionfruit Cake

Last week it was Mum's birthday and that meant a sad and happy day for me. Sad cause she's not here for her special day, and happy cause we could remember her with the traditional Ormsby 'we love you lots and wish you were here for your birthday' cake.....sponge cake with lashings of whipped cream and a thick covering of passionfruit icing. Mmmmm, my mouth's watering as I think of it. It never gets old or overdone to me, even though we have 5 of them each year. (By the way, last week Natalie said she doesn't like that cake and doesn't want us to do that for her....I love it and I'd be chuffed if my family would make that in my honor if I wasn't around, just so you know!)

Bathing Babies

Most days are long days for me. And I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way....they're just long. By 4pm-ish I feel like I'm on the homeward stretch, and I love that. Since Faith was born I have loved bathtime. To me, bathtime signals that bedtime for the kiddies is near and that means relaxing on the couch is not far away for me!

So last week I decided to take some photos of my babies in the bath. Every adult has some of those shots right? Especially ones where it's not only them in the bath, but at least one or 2 siblings squashed in like lil' sardines. Hopefully these aren't too nudie to be published!

 

  

I suppose the mixed gender baths will have to stop before too long....not quite yet though.

FHE and Scripture Reading

This year I've made a huge effort to have FHEs every week. Monday is a sacred jujitsu night for Joe, so Wednesday night is FHE for us. I must admit, although sometimes it's a last minute thing and more often than not it involves the girls fighting and me yelling 'listen!!!!' or 'be obedient please!!!!', it is a night that I really enjoy. We've had some cool lessons, fun games and yummy treats.


I love that the girls conduct the meeting from in front of the TV every week. They always start with Choose the Right. We've done things like bury our bad words in the garden, learnt about what it means to wear white clothes and be baptised, make cards for family overseas, traced around the girls bodies and labelled body parts. We've also done gardening, learnt about tithing and how to be good friends at kindy and church.

Last week we had the pleasure of having Uncle Pete and Aunty Bz over for dinner and our lesson. We learnt about obedience (by talking about Nephi building a ship and Samuel the Lamanite being obedient and going back to preach repentance on the wall). Cause we did this on monday and Joe was out, we re-did it on wednesday. I said to Joe tonight that the girls are so disobedient that we might re-do that lesson a couple of nights a week for the next few years. Maybe then it will actually sink in!!!!

On a slightly different note, this year I've also been reading the BoM every day. In the past I've been on again off again, but when I had to give a talk on goal setting on New Years day this year in sacrament, I confessed that it's always one of my goals to read my scriptures daily and it's always something I fail at. That turned out to be a good idea, cause I felt accountable to the whole ward by having them know that I was going to try and conquer it this year.

So I'm pleased to say, that up until  now I have read every day this year, even on the night I came home after having Seth, I got out my scriptures and sat up in bed to cuddle my brand new baby and read the Book of Mormon. I've finished it once so far and now I'm 20.2% through it for the second time. Some days when things are really crazy I only read 1/2 a chapter, other nights I do a few in a row. Just depends.

I found a cool app for my phone a few weeks ago called LDS reading chart. So now every day I check off my new chapter and it tells me how much I've read. I really like knowing how far through I am, especially cause I don't see pages numbers now that I read on my phone. And I'm totally loving what I'm learning and the Spirit that I feel as I read that book each and every day. It makes me feel like Mum sometimes cause I often think about how she used to sit in the lounge in the dark (almost) with the sheepskin on her knee in the freezing cold, and read the Book of Mormon. Great example!

I'd like to say I've got it down for life now but we'll see.

And cause we've got the big Family version of the Book of Mormon we're trying to read that every day too. At the moment it's more like 5 days out of the week, which is good but we'll try and get it to 7/7. The girls do one verse each and me and Joe do a couple. Seth does one too (Joe thought it would be funny to talk in a squeaky little voice and say that's Seth....haha). We've done it for almost 3 weeks and I think we're still in chapter 2! I can't imagine going like that the whole way through to the end. The girls will be finished primary school by then surely :)

Summerland Kindy and Stars Kindy

On Monday morning last week, Faith went on a trip to the museum. As soon as she woke up she ran down the hallway saying 'it's my trip today!!!'.

She was paired up with a little girl called Katie and her Mum.

When she got back I asked her to tell me what she learnt and all I kept hearing about was the bus ride......Eventually she said she liked the volcano.

I'm so super grateful that the girls like going to their kindys and they have wonderful teachers that care for them. Faith loves Kathryn, and Ella loves Zoe. They've both got boyfriends too!!!! Faith's boyf is called Tavoka (he's south african I think) and Ella's is Isaac or Joshua (apparently she's quite popular with the boys...oh no!)

Ella's off on a trip to the farm today. Hopefully she'll be able to tell me about the animals she sees and not just the bus!

I wonder if she went crazy with the animals on her farm trip like she did with Ninja and the party ponies!

I want to be regular!!

and I'm not talking regular with number 2s. I'm talking about regular with 'blogging'. Oh wait, that kinda does sound like poo!!!

I've decided that I'm going to try and put up a new blog post every monday. Probably nothing much exciting, but just 'the things that we do' as Faith likes to say. That might not sound too taxing, but right now Faith's at kindy, Seth's asleep and Ella's screaming while she tries to put on her jacket. It's inside out and upside down so she's not winning with that. I just tried to help her and she said 'get out, I'll put you in your room!'

So here's what we've been up to this last week.

Seth fast asleep in his bassinet

This was the 2nd week in a row that Seth wore a collared shirt to church. He looks pretty chuffed with himself. By the time we got home the whole top of his shirt and onesy were soaking. Time for bibs!

This was Seth on saturday night when Dad took Faith and Ella out to the Christy's farm with help with the Hangi. I was on the computer so he was in the lounge by himself....boring obviously

Joe was just saying a few days ago that he doesn't have photos of him and Seth asleep like he has with the girls (because they were needy as!!!!). Seth's so good that he doesn't need to be cuddled all the time, he actually knows how to have a rest in his bed. But this is one that I managed to get yesterday evening. I took the girls into the room to dress up for a dance show and when we came back the boys were fast asleep.

Faith missed Kindy last Tuesday so we could go to Seth's hearing test at Greenlane. Thankfully everything turned out to be ok (which we'd realised cause he's getting a bit sensitive to noises around the house). Afterwards Faith convinced me to take her to the mall and have a muffin at a cafe....plus a little play on every kids 'put the money in' thing we saw.