Today I spent the whole day cleaning my house. It felt good. I love this house so much and it feels good to be good to it.

I have one week before I go back to university and I know that it is going to be a huge year, so I want to spend the next week sorting out my office, unpacking the last lingering boxes, watching some new shows with C (The Bridge & Rectify) and on the floor playing with Theo. Here are some pictures from my (not so) lazy Sunday afternoon.


I finally found a kitchen table I liked for our tiny dining space and made a 2 hour round trip yesterday in the rain by myself to pick it up. I had been scouring opshops and Gumtree for an old laminex table but I thought this one suited the house more, even if it doesn't go with my bright orange vinyl swivel chairs. I am a bit addicted to Gumtree.


I really like spending time in Theo's room. Today I hung up some more pictures (with help from my tall husband).


We have an enormous lavender bush in our backyard and despite the bees' protests, it was time to harvest it. Sadly everything in the garden is dying down, ready for a cold Tasmanian Winter. I'm going to give some friends bunches of the lavender for their homes.


Rigby is a lot happier at this house. In our previous house, the two young boy cats weren't allowed outside and would relentlessly bully Rigby to the point where she would pick a space in a room and stay there for days. She's actually a little bit affectionate now and doesn't mind being around us or the other cats.


Mesca is good at glaring.


Earlier in the week we made a quick trip to Hobart to see DJ Shadow. International acts rarely come to Tasmania, especially ones we love, so I jumped at the chance. I bought the tickets in secret and organised for our lovely friend Mel to mind Theo and surprised C with the tickets as an anniversary present (5 years together!) - before the show we went to a fantastic burger place and I picked this Lucky Beer for C to have with his burger and made him keep the bottle for a vase. Unfortunately neither of us enjoyed the show (a combination of a bad venue for the type of music, patrons who danced violently and stomped on my feet, the sound being ear-drum-burstingly-loud and the act not really living up to our expectations). That was a long story to tell you where I got a bottle!


I always thought bathrooms were ugly places never to be photographed, but our new bathroom is pretty cute. I love prints of mountainous landscapes with rivers and I think this one works really well in this space, like a little portal into another world.


You know how there are those days when you hate every item of clothing that you own and feel like you have nothing to wear? Thankfully I don't seem to have those days any more - I have so many dresses I love.


Tintin and C in the kitchen.


A bit chipped, but I still love the colours.


Getting ready to roast some cherry tomatoes (given to us by our neighbour) and rosemary from our garden.


My boy and his toys. Today while I was cleaning he went through my shoe collection and became totally fixated on a pair of red t-strap high heels. He just sat there holding them and turning them around in his hands. I thought I'd put them on and show him what they were for and he followed me around trying to grab them!


Another spot Rigby enjoys.

+ sharing a smile with a stranger
+ taking photos from the passenger seat
+ sprinkling herbs from our garden on everything I cook
+ trying lots of different teas at T2 (a tea shop where they have tiny little orange cups and jugs of tea that you can sample). There were so many I liked but the boxes didn't have prices on them, so I just assumed they were out of my price range!
+ tickling my baby and listening to his sweet giggles
+ neighbours who share their fruit and veggies with us (today: a huge bag of cherries and a more blueberries than I've ever seen in one place!)
+ finally organising a housewarming party. It will be a vinyl party, so our friends can bring their favourite records and we'll play them, or they can pick things from our collection.
+ Theo's ambitious crawling. Achievement unlocked! He crawls so well and so quickly and is so proud of himself. He can pull himself up to standing in his cot, but he had an altercation with the coffee table today where he tried so, so hard to pull himself up, but it just didn't quite happen.
+ C's delicious curries
+ finishing up painting my traffic controller box (bittersweet!)
+ replacing the battery in the bathroom scales and looking down at a number that didn't make me feel bad.
+ going on a movie date, sans baby. My mum took care of Theo one night while she was staying with us so that we could go to the first screening of Launceston Film Society for the year. We saw 'Enough Said' with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, James Gandolfini & Tavi and really enjoyed it.
+ bright blue nails
+ being nice to our garden
+ swapping a friend of ours a slow cooker for his food dehydrator (dried bananas, yay!)
+ trying on fancy dresses, even if I didn't end up buying any.
+ drawing with a really good black pen on white paper
+ everything Theo does. I love feeling those little pangs of joy in my chest.
+ coincidentally discovering that there is in fact a website dedicated to Little Joys.

What's bringing you joy?

The location of our new house has fantastic proximity to opshops for optimum thrifting opportunities. I'm trying to watch my wallet at the moment (hello broken washing machine out of the blue, goodbye savings) but I figure that opshopping is my recreation, because I don't go out drinking or partying or have any expensive hobbies, so I let myself spend a little here and there. This week I found a couple of sweet baby items and some nice miscellany. Some of the baby clothes don't actually fit my big eight month old, but I'll keep them for a one-day baby.


I thought this romper was particularly cute and I made Theo wear it as soon as I got home with it. Look at those juicy leg rolls! I like to squeeze them and make him giggle.


Cute children's clothes hangers.


A pop-up book about cats. As you can imagine, C was pretty taken with this. Must keep out of Theo's reach until he is older.


I had one of these green heart pillowcases already, so it was nice to find its pair - I wonder if they are in fact from the same set. I've never read any Donna Tartt but have had this book recommended to me on numerous occasions and am a bit desperate for an engrossing read.


Sweet red overalls and a brown vest with gingerbread men buttons.


I love anything gingham and wooden toys.



Theo won't fit these cute suits sadly, but I'll add them to my future-baby collection.


I've been trying to find some fun toys for Theo at the opshop and so far he's pretty taken by these two. Toys are so expensive new and the overabundance of perfectly good ones at the opshop an indication as to the disposable nature of toys.


Ninety percent of the time Theo wears coverall zip up or press-stud suits. Most of the mums I know dress their babies in 'real people' clothes (t-shirts, jeans, trackpants, hoodies, etc). Maybe it's me trying to keep Theo looking like a baby, but I veer to the side of extreme practicality just about all of the time - I want things that he can move around in easily, that keep him warm and that can get roughed up and messy, but it is nice to get some things that are more hard-wearing or that make him look more like a little boy than a baby like these stretchy jeans and overalls. I'd also like to say, I love superfluous baby clothes pockets - what is he going to keep in them? Rocks? Food scraps? His dummy?


I love button-on pants. Don't look too closely though because Theo already wore this set to our friends Isis and Damien's 'Year of Retirement' party (they sold Milkbar) and he devoured many strawberries from their garden which got all over him and I'm working on getting (C to get) the stains out. I suppose that is the beauty of thrifted clothes! This one cost me a dollar.


Something to hang on the wall and put tiny things in? Sold! I might paint it a different colour, though I like the white squares among the pink ones.


I have been looking for a nice big rug for our lounge room but haven't really found anything that was just right (colour, size, price). I grabbed this shaggy blue circular rug from the opshop because I thought that Theo would enjoy the texture (which he does, but he also enjoys pulling out the fibres!). It definitely does the job for the time being.

Have you had any secondhand successes lately?

I've been a bit bad at blogging lately. I don't have my office space set up properly yet and over the last week our office has doubled as a spare room while my mum stayed with us. We had a great time with her here (although I think C is relieved as she likes to be very cheeky to him and says lots of mean things to him) and it was lovely to see her interacting with Theo and him enjoying her company and we took some nice drives with her and had lots of good chats. She has some pretty incredible stories from her formative years, especially from the years when she used to ride around with bikers in Western Australia when she was about 18. On the drive to Strahan she shared lots of her stories from that period and I had this beautiful image of my mum with her long blonde hair, on the back of a blue Ducati that was loaded up with lots of bags, riding through the Nullarbor Plains, with a tough biker on the front, and my mum trying to read a book and only being able to read every right hand page because when she'd try to turn the pages they'd rip out and fly off into the desert (a true story). Only my mum could turn riding around with tough bikers into something cute and dorky. I love her stories and I hope she gets to write some of them down before her memory goes. She's a really incredible person.

I have a Pinterest board dedicated to places in Tasmania I want to visit and the West coast was high on that list and somewhere we hadn't taken my mum, so I was really excited to go there. We initially planned to visit Cradle Mountain on the way back from our trip to Strahan and go for some nice rainforest walks there, but we didn't get a chance - the drive was several hours long each way and Theo made us stop frequently, although when we'd stop we'd always find a great lookout and were kind of grateful for his whinging!




Before we left we went to the Harvest Markets in Launceston and got some delicious Wanderlust pies and a big punnet of blackberries which Theo enjoyed!

The whole drive was amazingly picturesque and there were such varied landscapes - desolate plains, lush rain forests with leafy canopies over the road, enormous pink granite mountains, winding cliff-side roads, burnt out forests, grassland moors, barren hills, alpine highlands, rocky scrub and hulking, majestic mountain sides. The wind on the West coast could knock you off your feet and much of it is blanketed in snow in colder months and totally uninhabitable. Since I've been home I can't stop thinking about the landscapes.


Near Queenstown.


Penguin Cradle Trail.


An amazing house in Queenstown.


Queenstown.


Black Bluff, Middlesex.


My mum and I freezing on a platform at Gormanston, freaking out about seeing lightening all around us!


Gormanston.


A burnt out inn at Gormanston. The water is full of tannin.


Queenstown's famous gravel football oval.


Gormanston.


Gormanston.


Queenstown.


Strahan.


Gormanston.


The theatre in Queenstown.


Black Bluff, Middlesex.


A sweet house we saw in Queenstown.






We stayed at a lovely boutique cottage in Strahan and ate delicious pizza on the harbour when we finally got in. I wish that we had had more time there - driving through the amazing landscapes was wonderful, but it would have been nice to be able to explore a little more - next time!