The sun has got his hat on...

...hip hip hooray! I love it when the sun shines and it makes me feel great.  I have nothing as dramatic as SAD but I do find my mood affected by the atmospherics. I do dislike the long, relentless winter we experience in England. Therefore when the sun is shining I am generally a happy lady.  I'm hoping that the Australian weather suits me and in fact all of us, apart from the 6-8 weeks when it is absolutely baking and we move from 1 air conditioned room to another!  I wonder when faced with a more idyllic climate (in my eyes) if my obsession with the weather will dilute and become less of an issue as many more days will be lovely.  Or will I become more critical and what would be considered a lovely day to me now will become just an OK sort of day.  I wonder.

What a weekend we are having, the days are sunny and warm.  Finn has been in shorts, Isla in short sleeved tops.  BBQ'ing is taking place and we even cracked open the new paddling pool which we fortuitously bought last week in preparation for the good weather.  Having learnt our lesson last year when at the last minute we went to buy a pool during the hot weather and all the good ones had gone.

We have spent the day at home and the children have played on the patio, in the sandpit, run around on the grass, examined lots of bugs, played on their trikes, larked around and generally had a great time.  We had a BBQ for lunch and Finn and I bathed Bella (my childhood pony) this afternoon.  Isla has mastered going down the steps on the patio.

......and all of these lovely lovely moments have been captured on my "all singing all dancing" brand new Canon 50D SLR camera.  I have bought a companion manual to teach me the basics before I start a course in Sydney in January and so far I have managed around 20 pages of it.  I have covered the authors 10 top hints and already I think I have created infinitely better pictures than I ever have before and I am champing at the bit to learn and produce more.  My novice handy work from the weekend so far:

 An ice-cream fan.

They both love their trikes.

Here I am trying to get a bit more "arty" with my composition!

Smiley boy.

I like how I can get the background to become out of focus.

So much fun was had by the 2 of them running though the duvet covers drying on the line!

Doing boy stuff and examining the bugs.

Just what I want to see; Isla learning from Finn what mischief they can get in to.

Bath time.  Finn had a ride on Bella on the way in from the paddock and showed no fear...I'm sure he would be good at a gymkhana in a couple of years!

In the paddling pool after I had helped up the temperature with 8 buckets of hot water!

My hubby.

I love Andy's smile here and Isla's exploration.

I have had to shrink all the photos from 5+ MB to 1 MB to make them manageable for this blog but I still think they look good.  I am having a good time learning and it's really really inspiring to have good results already.

I have already said but one of the reasons for writing this blog is to be able to provide something for Finn & Isla to read later on in life to know what we did and why.  Not just right now but hopefully we will maintain this and it will become a journal of our life during this amazing and wonderful time as they grow.  With this in mind I found a great website called Blog2Print which takes your blog and formats it for printing and binding by this company so you can keep a hard copy in a proper book format for prosperity.  What a great idea.  I started this blog in January as planned and I feel I am maintaining it pretty well and I'm sure it will be a great read for Finn & Isla in 20 years time.  So come December I'm going to print and bind a couple of copies of this blog and store it away for sometime in the future.  For each year I keep this blog I will do this.  Hopefully there should be around 18 or so journals to pass on to them.