Phew - made it

Yay managed to update my blog before the month was up! Lets start with the mad dog! Wow has he changed and grown. up - putting these two photos together makes it so obvious... did someone swap our dog? The past month has been a hard one. Any spare time has been spent with Mum.... sharing stories, reminiscing, organising funerals, discussing life in general and catching up with friends. A lot of Mum's friends have been over to say their goodbyes and it has been interesting catching up with all of them. Lots of stories of school and early adulthood as well as life as a parent have been discussed and I have learnt lots of news things I had never known about Mum! She is getting weaker and weaker but keeps surprising the doctors who expected her to die weeks ago... boy she can be stubborn! Her pain relief has been increased on numerous occasions and she is very tired most of the day. She has a couple of good hours each day and we take advantage of these to sit and chat (she can stretch out on her lounge). Some days I take a book along and just sit beside her and read whilst she dozes. Its nice just to be together.

In the midst of this my kids have been my saving grace. They are wonderful and try to help out where possible. My house has become a bit of a shambles and they are helping out with a lot more chores to try and keep this place tidy. We were also blessed to have some of Tonys family cook some meals for us and drop them around one day. It has been such a wonderful blessing to have a ready cooked meal just needing to be heated up at the end of the day. Oh... and they were yummy!

Anyway as a thankyou for the kids and just to remind them that life can be good and to put a smile back on their faces we took them away for a couple of days. We had planned on going down to Melbourne these holidays but with Mum getting so weak we didn't want to go that far or for too long so we went up to Sydney on the first Sunday of the school holidays.

We dropped our bags off at our motel (Oaks Harmony Apartments.....lovely!!) and headed down to Darling Harbour where we wandered around, checked out shops, and Tasha managed to walk in every water feature she could find!

Monday morning we got up and walked across the street to Central where we caught a train down to Circular Quay to catch a ferry across to Taronga Zoo. Then we caught a bus up to the front gates and started our day!

We had a great time. It was such a great day and I am so glad we did it. We saw lions and tigers and bears... oh my! We saw birds, baby elephants, wombats, tassie devils, chimpanzees, big cats, reptiles etc etc. The kids had a great time and it was so wonderful to see the fun on their faces.

Then we caught the gondola - sky safari back down to jetty to catch the ferry back to circular quay.

We went down to Darking Harbour for dinner and then went around to the Lindt Cafe as Tasha had been hanging out for a strawberry platter...... to find they close early on Monday nights! We got there to see a dark closed up cafe :(

We caught a monorail just to round off the day.... so in one day we caught... a train, a ferry, a bus, we walked, we went on the gondola and the monorail!

The kids were very excited by the lights and the stalls and Kyle got a new lightsaber (ooops his mum broke his last one!) and Tasha got flashy bunny ears. And then proceeded to hop the whole way from Harbourside to near the big Park (can't remember what its called).

We laughed and had heaps of fun and I am so glad we did it.

Then on tuesday we came home via Miranda Fair.... We headed to the Lindt cafe for Tasha and guess what..... they had run out of strawberry dipping plates!! So the poor girl had to have chocolate mud cake instead. Oh and we got one job out of the way... Tasha and I both got new clothes for Mum's funeral. Thats one more job I can tick off the list!