Hallie's trip to Melbourne.

Each year Hallie has specialist appointments at the Royal Children's Hospital. This year we went on the Tuesday after Easter and returned on Anzac Day.

Last year her surgeon, Professor Hutson who operated on her when she was only 6 weeks old (and had seen her for a review at age 3 months, 1 year, 7 years and 10 yrs), decided that she was going so well that he did not need to see her again. I remember at the Royal Children's in 2003 when she was just a newborn, "the Prof" as he is called, saying that his aim was to do such a good job with the surgery that following her tenth birthday, he would not need to see her anymore. I remember thinking ten years was such a long way away but then here we are …

The RCH in 2003 - 6wks old.

I wish I had taken a photo of the Prof with Hallie in 2003 but I didn't think of it back then. It would have been a great photo history to have a photo of the two of them, each time they met up.

RCH 2013 with "the Prof".

But here is a pic I found of Hallie at age 7 with her and Flynn's paediatrician, Dr Atherton. He took over from Dr Hewitt who had been seeing Hallie at the LGH since she was born but then retired and Dr Atherton, moved from Sydney and took over as their paediatrician. In every 3 month period, he sees Flynn at 8 weeks (to do his bloods) (Hallie is old enough to have hers done downstairs at pathology on the same day) and then both of them at the 12 week mark (to check blood results and change med dosages if needed, blood pressure etc) and then the time starts over again unless they are really sick and admitted to hospital where Dr A just comes straight downstairs from kids ward to emergency and takes over because he knows their condition and history so well. Luckily only Flynn has been in and I have Dr A's mob number which thankfully I have never had to use.

And then this is them again just a few months ago. Time certainly flies.

This is Hallie and Flynn's paediatric endocrinologist that visits from Melbourne every six months, Dr Werther. He has been seeing Hallie since 2003 and then Flynn from 2011.

So every 12 months now, we will still have to come to the RCH and see another specialist with Hallie and the blessing is that we get to catch up with the Andrews and spend some time with them. Since Nora was born, we have been hanging out to meet her and it was so lovely getting to know her.

We got to walk with Jess and Nora and Bastian to his school for pre-kinder and check out his classroom.

Hallie and I caught the tram to the hospital. We had never caught a tram before in Melbourne and I baulked at the idea as trams seem very confusing to me. Give me the Seoul subway system, which caters very efficiently for 12 million people, anyday! Jess and Kyle don't live too far away from the hospital so Jess told me how to use her myki card and off we went and it actually wasn't that bad after all.

We had to wait a few hours at the hospital for the appointment but we knew that would probably be the case. Our record wait is 4 hrs but this time it was only 1.5hrs.

The RCH looks so good now that they have built a new one. It is so much better than the old one and I love the meerkats and the huge fish tank.

Once we had Hallie's appointment done, we had a few days to spend catching up with my Aunty, Mum's sister Sandra...

eating out…

Hallie's blurry pic of me and my old school friend Julie and her beautiful new bub, Sunday.

A few weeks ago on the TV show, The Project, they featured the winner of where the best marguerite pizza in the world was made…. and it happened to be on Lygon Street, just a few streets over from Jess' house. It was a place called 400 Gradi and  It. was. Amazing.

We really loved having lots of cuddles with Nora and she was such a good baby, sleeping on the tram rides and especially loving kicking about with her nappy off in the sun.

All too soon it was time to go back home.

I really loved having the one on one time with Hallie and being able to catch up with family without being distracted by 4 other kids. :) 

We missed the other kids though and Simon took a few pics of them to send, once Flynn was better.

And they were busy while we were away, pulling all the pumpkins from our garden, Mum and Sarra took a day trip to Hobart with Lisa and Simon and the boys also went on a day trip to Ulverstone to see Oma and Pop.

Easter time.

Our Easter weekend started on Good Friday with a yummy breakfast and what better way to start off Easter than with the missionaries coming over. We provided the physical nourishment and they the spiritual.



Plus I thought for Mum's last Easter at home for awhile, it would be nice to have a breakfast with the sister missionaries, (Sister Tauti and Sister Rooney) seeing as Mum was soon to be off to the biggest family history centre in the world. People, if you have any questions on how to find out about your ancestors, like way back into the forages of history -then my Mum (aka Sister Gibson) will be your man, er woman.

The table doesn't look like much here but that was before I put out waffles, fruit, bacon, toast, eggs, hash browns, juice, chocolate sauce…. and the list went on! I want to make it a tradition just like we did at Christmas, to have the missionaries over for breakfast as they bring such a wonderful loving feeling into people's homes when they visit. We often have them for tea, but breakfast is something different and more fun.

The kids love it too when the missionaries come over because they have so much fun with them and the missionaries love spending time playing with them. They have a wonderful ability to make each child feel super important and their favourite person in the whole world.

They even spent time doing the latest craze - loom bracelets with the kids.

After breakfast the missionaries did a little spiritual thought with us to do with Easter and Jesus Christ. it was very simple and very effective. They chose Hallie to stand with a clothes basket and one by one we put something heavy in it.

It got heavier and heavier but she was not allowed to put the basket down.

We all laughed when Simon put Flynn in the basket.

The missionaries explained that Jesus Christ took on the sins of the world (weight of the basket) on himself because of his love for us and for his desire to help carry some of our burdens and provide the knowledge that we too can be sorry for our own wrongdoings and help lighten someone's else load.

It was lovely having them come for breakfast and start off our Easter weekend thinking about the true meaning of Easter and not just all the yummy chocolates that were going to come...

The next morning, the kids woke up and discovered that Easter bunny had been to visit. They were so excited to go outside and see what he had left behind for them.

You wouldn't know it from this pic (as he was a little better by then) but Jonty had croup and ended up being bad enough that we went to the Deloraine Hospital and the doctor gave him some medicine as his airways were still quite blocked and his breathing still Darth Vadar raspy.

The next morning on Easter Sunday, Jonty was very tired still from the croup and I was still battling the flu and mourning that I didn't feel like chocolate and Flynn decided to get gastro so the three of us stayed home from church. Flynn ended up being sick until Wednesday so it was good to get him to rest.

That night the Wheelers were coming over for our family Easter dinner and the kids set up all the eggs to give out in a line in the lounge room.

We had a lovely roast lamb and enjoyed chatting around the table for our last big dinner with Mum before she was going to leave for her mission.

The kids then enjoyed handing out the eggs to each other and we also did the Easter story of Jesus using plastic eggs which told part of the story inside each egg, like a nail, purple cloth, coins, etc and the last egg was empty which represented the tomb being empty after Jesus was resurrected. The kids love doing this as we usually hide the plastic eggs and they love going on a little hunt. They get to read out part of the story in each egg and show us what was inside. Its a great way to tell the story as opposed to just reading it from the Bible.

At the end of the night, even Flynn woke up long enough to hold his egg.

Flynn turns 3.

April was such a busy month and it started with the hard drive going on our Mac. All I could think about, when we got it back 2 weeks later, was the backlog of posts it created. :) We were lucky that there was a recall on Apples in 2009 to fix faulty hard drives and our computer woes fitted the brief. Our computer was registered with Apple and they and us had no details of a recall email being sent so voila it was able to be done at no cost to us. Thank goodness!!

On the 12th of April we celebrated Flynn's 3rd birthday!! He is turning into such a grown up little boy now.

Never short of "present opener helpers" in our house.

Flynn and his "bubbas" and wearing his new outfit by Nan.

Flynn loves Peppa Pig and especially "Peppa George" so Sarra and I made him this cake. I'm not really practiced with fondant or colouring it but we got there in the end.

Before Simon went to work, the kids helped him put Flynn's new kitchen together. Jonty and Flynn love concocting pretend food for us to eat.

For tea, Flynn just wanted "hapes" (shapes) and "hips" (chips) and "whizz" (fizz)

It was nice having Mum fly in from her month staying with Jess in Melbourne to spend 3 weeks with us before she went on her family history mission to America.