Cobbler Creek

Today Rory has a pupil free day, so he is meant to be working on assignments. I don't want him getting to much in the habit of Calvin in this comic strip.

 One of the things he needed to do was collect 10 different seed. It is such a nice day today, it is forecast for 19C and sunny. I thought that it would be nice to go for a walk in the reserve, with Anabelle and Benjamin, and help collect the seeds. We decided to go down into the creek during our walk. It is the first time I have actually walked through parts of the creek in the 13 years we have lived in our home. It looked so beautiful down there and so relaxing walking at Benjamin and Anabelle's speed. I had to take some photos with my phone.

Rory and Benjamin walking ahead.

Rory wishes he could add a water feature to this spot.

Rory would hang out with his friends here last year.

Anabelle insisted on bringing her baby.

Looking at the water.

Our home is up there.

At the top of the creek other side to our home. You can just see our roof through the trees.

I think I will have to go for a walk down there more frequently and enjoy this beautiful land Heavenly Father has blessed me with.
Thanks Rory's teacher for his assignment. Without it I probably wouldn't have ever gone down to the creek.

Learning Chinese

Our local primary school teaches Chinese and as a result 4 of our children are learning the Chinese language (both speaking and writing the characters). Rory has been doing it for 8.5 years now. He no longer goes to primary school but was lucky enough to be excepted into Adelaide High School through the Language program. He has been there for almost a semester and was chosen by his Chinese teacher to be interviewed by a reporter about learning Chinese in school. The article was in the Saturday Advertiser a couple of weekends ago. A found a link to this article but the photo of his class isn't included.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/ipad/lost-for-words/story-fn3o6wog-1226365668540

I know that Heavenly Father has blessed Rory with this ability to learn the Chinese language. He is also studying Spanish but is not enjoying it that much. Probably because he is starting for scratch so it requires more effort than the Chinese is. He is doing so well with both languages and I look forward to seeing his progress through his high school years.

Flooding

Not sure how many people know but at the end of October last year we had some flooding occur in our house. A pipe had burst in the wall and water had gone into 3 of our bedrooms. We were very blessed in that we were about to leave for church when Damien discover it. The mains were turned off and we went to church.

After church we started to assess the damage with the help of Mum and Dad Pilkington. We were very lucky that they came to assist as neither myself or Damien were coping at that moment with what had happened. We knew that the girls room had flooding and that our room had a little as well but later that day I noticed that Rory and Charles' floor was wet under the desk.

On Monday Damien left messages with the insurance people and got someone out the dry the carpets. When Steamatic came to do the carpets we found out it was worse again than we thought. The carpet was no good and had to be removed. The 2 children's room carpet was almost completely removed  and a section of our carpet was removed. The flooding had only gone on for about 30mins. I was informed that if it had been the 4 hours that we normally would have been out our whole house could have been flooded.

Our 4 bedroom home with retreat was turned into a 1 bedroom house with some of us sleeping in the lounge room. After 9 weeks (5 days before Christmas) with dehumidifiers going constantly we were able to sleep in our rooms again but with out carpet. We didn't get to pick our carpets until the beginning of February and had our carpet installed 3 weeks ago.

What were the blessing we received from the trial. New carpet ( the old carpet was almost 13yo), the motivation to paint the room, Benjamin's cot out of our retreat, all our storage and junk out of our retreat and finally a clean room.

What about the children's room you might wonder. We have floating floor boards to install in there rooms including the hall and Isiah's room. Hopefully it doesn't take us too long to get their rooms ready to do this.

I was hoping to install some photos but I'm not sure were they are at the moment. I hope to be able to put them up soon.

hello everyone

Hi to whoever reads this. It has been quite a long time since I have updated this blog but after my drought on reading other blogs (a big thank you to those that add to their blogs regularly) it has encouraged me to what to share some of our families life. Hopefully I can accomplish this. I plan on encouraging the children to add blogs to it as well. We'll see how we go.