penguin begets penguins: Walker, New South Wales Ranger.

It is cool & rainy this morning so far & I'm loving it. I should be cleaning our stupid apartment but I can't bring myself to do it. Ben is napping & Marcel is at the new house, painting his little heart out. Sadly he will accomplish more in a few hours alone than if I was there to help him because I ask a million questions (Does this look right? Are you sure this is right?) & keep interrupting with my decorating schemes that are truly exciting to me but not so much to him (Ooooh, you know what we should put here? A TABLE!). Ugh, why does he put up with me? We didn't paint on Friday after all but we spent a good chunk of time at Bunnings, like Home Depot in America, & bought enough painting supplies & crap to last us a while. We painted a lot on Saturday & I put most of our clothes in the closets, which was very exciting. It's slowly coming together & is starting to feel a bit like home already. Once we have furniture & the rest of our crap there I think we're really going to love the place.

So much still to do - line up a pool person to come out & show me what the heck to do with the thing, replace the world's ugliest closet door handles, decide on colours for the kitchen & office, plant the little rock ditch thing that used to be a koi pond, do a little weeding, figure out where on earth that plugged in wire goes to in Ben's room! Luckily the rain today is taking care of the plants because I was wondering how much & when we need to water them. I have some serious googling to do for our landscaping.

We have a nice array of bird visitors all the time, which thrills my soul. We had lorikeets, rosellas, galahs, plovers, mina (sp?) birds, those little grey ones with pointy pope hat-looking things on top of their heads & a big bunch of cockatoos swooped overhead but didn't stop in. Very exciting, right? Maybe it's just me that gets excited about birds.

And most importantly, our little awesome Benny took his first official step yesterday!!!! We are choosing to ignore the step he took with Marcel the day before because he fell right after he stepped & yesterday's he actually stepped & kept standing. And let's face it if a child steps without his mother witnessing it, it didn't happen. IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. He did it again a couple of times but we could never get it on video because he gets too distracted by the camera. You could tell how proud he was of himself because he just laughed & laughed & gave us hugs & kisses. His kisses are getting less slobbery by the way - they're downright pleasant now. Between walking & turning 1 in a few weeks, I just don't know what to do. Is it too motherly to say he's growing up too fast? Every time he goes through another change, I think to myself "This is it. He's perfect now. He can just stay this way forever." But he keeps getting better & better. My little Turd Ferguson is a special boy.

I'll try to get some painting & walking pictures today but we still haven't found our bloody camera, which we now think it's safe to assume was packed away. But we've got Marcel's iphone so we'll get something. We have some painting pictures from yesterday but I look roughly the size of a water buffalo so we won't be posting those. You can tune out now before I start my regularly scheduled whining but I am seriously starting to exercise soon & eating better. Marcel is starting too. I was going to start walking in the new neighborhood to check everything out but that would be the morning I busted the old toenail. Stupid thing is feeling better but I'm not going to go into it with you now because it would be an essay unto itself & just thinking about it makes me squeamish so I don't want you to suffer as well!

Anyway, I can't remember where I was going with that so we'll just say I'm going to lose weight over the next few months so I don't hate my body anymore. Hmmmm ... I can't end this on such a woeful note so I'll share with you the one photo from yesterday that doesn't showcase my lard butt.