30.6.13

26/52

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013."

Sofia: nose in a book.
Otto: enjoying his new ball.


Sofia loves books and can often be found in the book corner of the sunroom with piles of her favourites around her. She has been very chatty this week, entertaining us with prolonged story-driven monologues.

I bought Otto a ball this week and he has spent a fair amount of time attached to it. As Ian pointed out - there are a lot of nipples to enjoy!

I didn't look at a lot of portraits this week, but one that caught my eye was Lamb and her chocolate milk.


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23.6.13

25/52

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013."

Sofia: captivated by Spectra.
Otto: still has his knuckle dimples.


Sofia and I visited Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra at sunset on Saturday. The lights and sounds were mesmerizing.

Otto has been (commando) crawling around like a crazy thing - to the point where I have had to employ the safety gate we have on the step up from the playroom. He wasn't very impressed at the curtailment and his pudgy little hand kept reaching under the gate as he tried to figure out what it was all about.

A favourite from 24/52 was Mel's beautiful reflection.

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22.6.13

Apples for the birds

It's been a pretty full on year with two little people running/crawling around the place and not sleeping nearly as much as we'd like them to. So we've ended up leaving quite a lot of fruit on the tree a few times due to a general lack of time and energy. The last of the apples is just getting over ripe now and the birds have been loving it - unfortunately there are no apples left now that aren't half munched. Obviously lorikeets love fruit...
Musk lorikeet
Rainbow lorikeet
We have also seen yellow wattlebirds, silvereyes and green rosellas getting into the apples but haven't managed a photo yet.

Sofia loves birds. One of her favourite bed time "stories" is Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by Simpson and Day and she knows the names of quite a few birds. Each night she remembers being marauded by emus at Zoodoo and the day the ibis tried to steal her lunch at Hyde Park in Sydney. So when we heard there was a Tawny Frogmouth seen only a few hundred metres away in one of its regular haunts yesterday, we had to wander round to the university and look for it. We'd looked a few times before on our afternoon walks without success. But today, there were two frogmouths sitting in the birch outside the Commerce Building as promised.

Tawny Frogmouths
I always love seeing these birds - even more so because they eat mice and these two birds probably hunt in our yard.

20.6.13

Outtakes - Otto

Just a few short months ago I noted that it was hard to get a suitable photo of Otto. How things have changed - these days Otto is the easier subject and Sofia is increasingly reticent.

These are a few of the shots of Otto that missed the cut from 24/52.






18.6.13

Renovation Motivation

We haven't done anything on the renovation since before Otto was born but recent events have reminded us that this house will fall apart one day if we don't get onto it.

Over the summer we had a problem with the wiring in the kitchen and found out that none of the plugs in the kitchen or laundry have earths. An electrician fixed the problem but said it needed a more permanent fix. I also took him up into the attic rooms and he confirmed that there are some live wires (although not 240v) and some other wires with old rubber casing casing which could crack if we touched them.

More recently there have been a few issues with our roof. There is a skylight above where the staircase used to be which is really just a piece of corrugated plastic. We'd had some pretty windy weather and the skylight had become a bit rattly. I went up on to the roof and tried to bang the nails in the plastic back down but it was very brittle so I had to resort to gaffer tape. There was a large chunk missing from the top left corner which I couldn't do much about.

Ian gaffer taping the skylight

We found a roof fixer pretty urgently. And here is the finished product. You can see the roof still needs lots a lot more TLC but we're leaving that to the main renovation.


The next little incident was this weekend when we got our first rain for a while. I noticed during the night that there was a drip in the hallway which had happened once before. Then the next morning just as we were getting breakfast, the rain got very heavy. There was "rain" falling all the way across the hallway near the skylight outside the kitchen. Sofia was a bit upset because we were in such a rush to fix it. We don't have any actual photos of the rain inside because we were madly trying to fix the problem but here is the aftermath.


Note the rusted light fitting

I quickly got out of my pyjamas and into some clothes. As I was putting my boots on I noticed that there was also a big leak in the room inside the back door where we keep our boots.


So I grabbed the ladder and got onto the roof as quickly as possible, still in heavy rain. The roof over the back part of the house is like the house below it - built in many stages, not always with the highest quality standards and not really maintained. There weren't a lot of leaves on the roof but there were just enough to block some of the gutters which caused the water to back up and get into the roof. It was pretty easy to fix the problem and then get out of the rain and into a warm shower.

We really need to get started with this renovation...

16.6.13

24/52

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013."

Sofia: trying out her new trike.
Otto: ewok chic in his new hoodie.



A favourite from 23/52 was this sleeping stretch.

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9.6.13

23/52

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013."

Sofia: a stealth portrait.
Otto: sitting up.


Disclaimer: a bit of a token effort this week as I have been unwell, have not touched the camera and have taken only a few shots on my iPhone.

Sofia can still be very wary of the camera even though she loves looking at photos of herself, so I was taking photos with my phone on the sly. I think in this one she had just twigged what I was doing.

Otto's sitting has just gotten very solid and he has been enjoying having both hands free. This week has also seen his crawling (commando style) go from strength to strength - he now rockets across the playroom floor!
 
A favourite from 22/52 was a lipsticked Lola.

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1.6.13

22/52

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013."

Sofia: a few of her favourite things - swing, binoculars, new pink flowery boots.
Otto: peeking out from under the couch (where he had rolled himself) - Ian took this one.


We were at the playground this week and about the only place that was suitable for Otto to have a roll around was in the mushroom circle. Sofia decided to join him and I captured these floor dance moves.




Favourites from 21/52 include twins Astro and Cupcake, Sage and Claudia.

Linking with the 52 Project at Che & Fidel

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