Woolley Family

Yesterday our family went to the Ekka for the first time ever.  We have lived in Brisbane since 1998, and have not been once.  Every year we hear so many people complaining about the crowds and the diseases and the cost and really had no desire to go.  This year we decided to give it a go. We have two children - Megan is 12 and Reid is 9.  I do not think I would brave it with younger children.  Even after giving very specific instructions we still managed to lose both of them at various times through the day. Before we went I had trouble finding many people who had written about their experience in detail so I hope this might help others who are deciding whether to go. Selecting the Day The public holiday for us is the Monday (Logan area), so that is the day that we chose.  I don't think I could have braved it on the weekend.  I got the feeling that the crowds really weren't too bad yesterday.  It was busy and there were a few lines but ...

I was going to title this post “Why we chose Bethania Lutheran School”, but then I realised that when we chose the school we knew very little about it.  We were living in Edens Landing at the time and I stumbled across this tiny school in the next suburb and I remember loving how green it all was.  I was taken on a tour and it just felt right.  We applied for admission, had an interview with Dr Marks, the principal, and we were in. We have now been part of the Bethania Lutheran community for almost eight years, since our daughter started Prep.  This year she finishes Grade 7 and although she is very excited to move on to high school, this milestone has caused me to wonder whether we will love our new school as much as we have loved Bethania.  Will I feel like they are part of my team as a parent?  Will they know my daughter almost as well as I do?  Will they care about her almost as much as I do? There will be many parents in the Bethania/Wa...

My daughter had her school athletics carnival this week.  This is a day that she looks forward to all year as she excels in athletics.  This year, however, she had a bit of a challenging day.  At one point through the carnival she was in tears telling me how she didn’t want to disappoint anyone.  It has led me to contemplate the difference between being feeling excited, and feeling proud, and I am writing about it now to get my thoughts in order so that I can explain to her why, no matter what the result, I am the opposite of disappointed. Let me preface this with a note that she is exhausted at the moment, physically and mentally.  She is in a production of Oliver at the local theatre, and the rehearsals have proven to be longer, more frequent, and more tiring than we imagined. Excited is how I felt when she won her 100m race.  Proud is how I felt when she kept going, even though she missed the start whistle and started a couple of seco...

Yesterday I cried all the way home from Fairfield to Windaroo. My home was well away from the floods. I hadn’t lost anything except my naïve assumptions about the damage a flood can do. But I couldn’t hold back the emotion. As the flood waters receded, we knew that we had to do something to help those affected by the Brisbane floods. Thousands of homes had been inundated by flood waters and they were saying on TV and on the internet that an army of volunteers was needed. I arranged for my Mum to come and watch the kids for the day, packed the car with brooms, shovels, mops, buckets, water and other cleaning supplies, and set off to try to “do some good”. My brother in law and his wife had friends on a street in Fairfield whose house had been submerged up to just under their roof, so they sent me the address and I headed for Fairfield. I was nervous as I didn’t know what to expect. As I drove under the overpass at Mt Gravatt I saw a huge line of volunteers over the bridg...

We decided that something we had to address with the kids was the fact that Reid was sleeping on Megan's floor on a mattress every night, which meant that neither of them were getting enough sleep. So I took the mattress out of her room one day and hid it in my cupboard, and told Reid he could sleep in his room or the spare room, just not Megan's room. When it came down to it, the only way to get Reid to sleep in a separate room was to lay down in bed with him until he fell asleep. For a few weeks now that's what we've been doing. Overall it is working. Reid is sleeping in a different room, and Megan is getting more sleep. This plan has it's disadvantages though. For one, most nights it's pretty even odds who is going to fall asleep first - him or me. A few nights I have woken up at 9:30pm to find him finally asleep next to me. How I fall asleep I don't know because Reid going to sleep is like a dog going to sleep - how they get up and down and turn a...

For Family Home Evening this week we watched the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D. The kids thought it was great fun and especially liked that we all sat down together wearing 3D glasses. There were a few scary bits and Reid did quite a few "jumps", especially during the prehistoric fish parts. They were pretty nasty looking though. Reid spent most of the movie exclaiming that someone threw water at him, or birds were flying out of the TV. I don't think he's seen anything in 3-D before. In all it was a clean family movie and a fun way to spend a Monday evening.

I have just been tagged by Konnie. The rules: 1. Go to the section of your computer where you store all of your photos. 2. Select the 6th folder. 3. Select the 6th photo from that folder. 4. Post and explain about that picture. 5. Tag 6 other people. Here is my photo: This was in 1999 in April. Forgive me for my memory but I THINK we were all down in Sydney to see Narelle's brother Reeve get married. I must have put those photos elsewhere because they are not in this folder. The people you can barely see are Narelle, Lauren, Jordan, Me and Dallas. We had a great time looking around Sydney together and to this day I still remember Alana eating her icecream. Aren't they cute?! Here's one to embarrass Jordan: Dallas had a great time playing with the kids back at the rooms: Not sure what's going on here! Narelle's uncle Nev is the one on the right. He needed a lift back to Brisbane, so he drove back with Dallas and I. I remember he made for some entertaining conversatio...