twenty five

And I have been for over a week now! It doesn’t feel too much different than 24, but here I am.

I had a lovely birthday, I got spoiled by my husband and daughter, and spent a lovely day with the latter when the former went off to work. We went to the markets with a friend and her daughter, and shared left over red velvet cake when we got home.

My two favourite people made me feel like a Birthday Queen!

Peter got me a sun-lounger for the veranda, that I had been eyeing off for ages!

And Mayana chose me some very gorgeous jewellery all by herself!

In the afternoon we hit the road to Noosa, and made it just in time to attend a very special Passover Supper that our adopted grandparents shared with us. It was beautiful, and a lovely experience to have on my birthday.

So I had a lovely day, and another birthday is down!

But not over yet… sometime after this baby is born, I’m off to my favourite hairdressers at Salon Unique for the full works… cut, colour, wax, tint… and whatever else they can throw at me. My lovely parents have given me a makeover! So…. now I’m on the hunt for a new ‘do. I’m thinking of going lighter again…. I think some time on Pintrest is in order!

What ideas do you have??

xx

Birthday Week // The Party and The Cake

Did you know that tomorrow is my birthday! I’m going to be 25… a quarter of a century. Crazy, no? I feel pretty good about what I have accomplished in my 25 years… a university degree under my belt, married for 6 and a half years, a three year old and a second child on the way… Not bad for 25 years I’d say!

In our usual tradition, we have been enjoying Birthday Week, which of course started off with our luxury weekend away. On Monday night we had a whole lot of friends over to share a meal. It was a very nice evening, I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did!

In another usual tradition, I also ended up making my own birthday cake, and I have to say, I’m super proud of this one…

It was a Red Velvet Cake with Marscapone Cream Cheese Icing. I’ve made red velvet cake before, but I think this one turned out even better…

I wanted to stack the cakes, so I sliced the top off of one to make sure it was a nice, even surface to stack onto. I crumbed up the sliced off part (and I may have eaten some of it too) to use as decoration on top of my cake.

I think it looked quite effective!

Inspired by a certain My Kitchen Rules contestant, I also decided to try my hand at a piped chocolate butterfly. For a first attempt, I was very pleased with the results.

And here it is… the finished cake in all its glory:

And it tasted pretty delicious too!

If anyone is interested, I got the recipe from here. The only thing I changed is that I wasn’t able to buy buttermilk (there was none in my whole town it seems!), so I made my own by mixing milk with sour cream until it reached a buttermilk-like consistency. As far as I could tell it didn’t make any difference to the end product.

Yum!

An ‘Us’ Weekend

Pete and I don’t get all that much time with just the two of us. We used to have date nights once a month, but have moved to a town where there is just not too much scope for places to go on a date night, and somehow that has fallen by the wayside (**note to self, reinstate date night!!)

Becoming a couple where both of us are working, as well as having a toddler to organise, has been hard for us to get used to. All that rush in the mornings to get everyone out of the door on time, and both us us so whacked from work of an evening that it’s all we can do to veg on the couch for an hour or so and watch TV.

So we were very keen to squeeze in a weekend away, just the two of us, before this baby arrives. After hearing only good things about the Wotif mystery deals, we decided to get brave and try one, and ended up with a night at the Hilton Brisbane for around $160. We were assigned a Deluxe King Room, but upon check-in, we were upgraded to an Executive King Room! It was very lovely. The Hilton is quite impressive, and in its grand foyer area, we couldn’t stop giggling because we felt like we were imposters who shouldn’t be somewhere so fancy! Our room was also very lovely (with fancy features like a heated mirror which didn’t fog up no matter how hot you had your shower), but the best bit of all was I was with my husband, and we could just hang out, with nowhere to go and nothing to do… unless we wanted to of course.

After spending most of the afternoon reading and snoozing, we decided to take a stroll over to Southbank – which is one of our favourite places to visit when we go to the city. We just wandered around, caught the end of the markets, and decided to have a go on the Brisbane Wheel (which we’ve always talked about doing but never done). It was lots of fun.

We had planned on dining somewhere fancy, but neither of us were very hungry and didn’t want to fork out a whole lot of dollars for something we couldn’t finish, and ended up going a bit more casual, and popped right next door to O’Malley’s Irish Pub.

There was a live band playing, and it’s a pretty cool place with great food at a great price. We had a lovely night, topped off by ice-cream from Royal Copenhagen.

We had a great time together, enjoying each other’s company and refocussing on what it means to be ‘us’ again.

I love my hubby!

35 Weeks

Flip! I officially have less than 5 weeks until my due date. Insane.

I have officially lost sight of my toes. In fact, I had to lean forward quite a bit to find them for this photo. The baby is feeling quite big, and movements now don’t feel so much like kicks as scrapes, as he moves his limbs (sometimes quite painfully) along my insides. It has been fun to try and guess whether those sharp poky bits are knees or elbows or feet, even if they sometimes do bring a tear to my eye!

I am well and truly running out of clothes now. I have mostly gotten away with stretchy or flowy summer dresses up until now, and it’s frustrating that less than five weeks out I have to actually fork out for some maternity-wear. But at this point it’s that or naked, and that’s not going to fly!

I am feeling well, still reading my birthing books and other people’s birthing stories (which really does little more at this point than bring back memories of how flipping much labour hurts) but I’ll get there. I spoke to the midwife at this week’s appointment about visiting the birthing suites, and I’m hoping we will get a chance to do that before I actually have to use them. They only allow visits on Sunday afternoons (their quiet time, who knew?) and we are well and truly running out of weekends!

We have decided to have Mayana and Baby Two in the same room from the beginning (for a number of reasons), and I am excited about setting up that room and moving Mayana in, hopefully in the next week or so, so we can get things sorted and ready.

So all-in-all, another week of pregnancy down, another week closer to meeting my son. Nothing too eventful, which is probably a good things, and I am enjoying my pregnancy and my bump and these last few weeks of having my baby safe and sound on the inside.

Can’t wait to meet him and cuddle him on the outside though!!

A Peek At My Week

This week has passed by in a blur. On Thursday morning, my work collegue and I suddenly realised that Friday was the last day of school. And we had so. much. to. do. Cue minor freak-out/panic. I’m actually feeling kind of relieved that I am going back for week 1 next term, so that I have a chance just to wind some things up and finish some things off.

I am, however, extremely grateful and excited that it is time for holidays! I’m looking forward to spending some time with my gorgeous Mayana-bird, getting my house tidy and shiny (I’m feeling the nesting bug starting to set in), my birthday and of course EASTERFEST!! It’s going to be a big week.

But we’re not talking about next week, this post is supposed to be all about last week.

So let’s have a look at those photos, shall we?

You can see that I finally finished Baby Two’s crocheted elephant. He’s pretty cute. I modified the pattern to include a t-shirt, because I wanted to give him some colour. And after much instagram/twitter/facebook discussion, I decided on buttons for eyes. I wasn’t sure about the black (they were the only matching ones I could find), but they’re growing on me.

I also made an Apple Tart to share at our department morning tea. It was my first attempt at a sugar-free version, and I thought it didn’t turn out too bad. 

You can also see the mess that my chooks have been making of my potplants. I was a little bit heartbroken because they have totally ripped out and destroyed our strawberry plants, which had finally just started to flower. Very sad.

We also had a department dinner this week, to farewell me into maternity leave. It was a lovely evening out, and my collegues spoiled me rotten, with gifts for our whole family. I’m especially looking forward to using the Hogs Breath Cafe voucher they gave us!

This weekend, my gorgeous hubby whisked me away for a weekend at the Hilton in Brisbane for some ‘us’ time. It was wonderful, and I’ll post more about that later.

It has been a very busy, and somewhat stressful week, and the weekend away was just what I needed to refresh. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to relax and recuperate this first week of holidays… though I’ll have to do it all over again next week after Easterfest!

I hope you had a great week too! I’d love if you played along too!

Zoey x