Busy, busy days

Well, Alice started her swimming lessons yesterday, and that combined with geocaching and farming in the Vale are contributing to keeping Family Chapman both busy and tired.

Alice's swimming lesson yesterday went well with her putting her face in the water to blow bubbles, using a pool noodle under her arms as a kick-board, floating all by herself, using a noodle to float on her back and other stuff too! Much the same again today I believe, although Josh and I stayed home.

Yesterday we found a geocache on the river in Riverton (who knew the Canning River flowed right by Riverton Leisureplex?) and another one at the Ruth Rd park. Had nothing to swap at the first hide, so made sure we took things to the second. Will establish a stash in the car for future use - Alice has started cleaning out little McDonald's type toys to use for swaps. She brought home a dinosaur of the Christmas cracker/lolly bag variety last night, exchanged it for a nice shell.

We took the kids for a play at the park after dinner in the hope that a bit of late in the day exercise would help them get to sleep. Well, it worked for one of them - Alice was so tired (and possibly amined to the hilt) and didn't get to sleep much before 9pm. Mike and I went to bed at 9, and she was asleep then.

Mike and I have spent a bit of time this morning clearing out dead and finished crops from the growbeds on AP1. We've got the plants that we bought almost a week ago to plant out. We pulled out all the brussels sprouts and some of the older silverbeets as the newer plants are all producing well and have such lovely, tender leaves and stalks. Also pulled out some sweet corn that did nothing, ditto beetroot and some minuscule lettuce.

We had trout, potatoes, ratatouille, steamed spinach and mushrooms for dinner last night. About half of the meal came from our farm! We're getting closer to sustainability/self sufficifency every day.

Oh, so very tired (gin and tonic night before last - still be feeling the effects for a couple more days...)