Hooray for the return of productivity today! This morning while Sophie slept, I swept the house, hung out a load of washing, washed down the two new doors and promptly got carried away with the bucket of sugar soap and washed down another few doors in the house for good measure. Then I used some Magic Eraser on some marks on the walls I've been meaning to get rid of for ages and cleaned up the kitchen. Then it was 10:00am.

So good to be productive again. Not looking forward to the time that Sophie will refuse to lay happily in her crib while I'm productive, but I'll make the most of it while I can. :D

Our First World Problem is now solved! We can now enter the house via the front door.

For over two years now, Steve and I have been traipsing up the back stairs to gain access to our house but no more! On Monday, two guys came around, did some hard work for 12 hours and now, we have two somewhat shiny doors with matching locks.

There is still a little bit of work to do; Steve is putting in magnetic clip things to stop the doors banging, and I'll have to putty and varnish the ugly bit on the front door at some stage, but right now, I can't complain. Working doors! Hooray!

The door guys also replaced the back screen door and built a proper door jam for it. So many doors!

Daughter

I have a daughter. Strange, but surprisingly not as hard to comprehend as I thought it would be. Home at last, but I have to say that the overall sleep deprivation of being a parent is difficult to cope with.

So while Steve was on holidays last week, he had some boys around and did some hard backyard action. It was a crazy backyard blitz working bee that lasted most of the day (and actually didn't really get finished until 5 days later, but no one is complaining about that, least of all me. :) ). 

John and Wade turned up pretty early and pulled out some trees around the front before the came round the back and got started with the BBQ. I was thinking the BBQ would take quite a bit of time, but they managed to pull apart the bessablocks like pros and the whole thing came apart like lego really. 

All the bessablocks are stacked under the stairs now. Ready to be a garden edging or a bookshelf. :D 

The boys also took out the large chunk of cement that has always lived in the middle of our yard for no apparent reason. Again, something we were thinking would take a long long time, but actually was just a matter of levering it up. Sarah's Steve turned up to help then too. You can see the bit I did in this photo.  I lopped off most of a tree at the very back corner and then sharpened an axe. It was a quality contribution to the day. Then I contented myself with providing refreshments and food for the hard workers. 

Good thing Melissa and Sarah were around to help lift the drainage into the trench the boys dug. This was probably the most time consuming part of the day. They took out more trees and dug the trench and then figured out how to put the drain together before they mixed the cement and put it all in.

We were short just a bit of cement, but Steve and I finished that off after another few trips to Bunnings. Backyard work seems to compound on itself quite easily. Digging the trench leads to putting the drain in, which meant that we had to sledge part of the fence cement on the side to put the drain around the house, which then needs to be joined up with the storm water drain, so we need to dig another trench and get some more pipe and take out another tree to do all that. It goes on and on. Thankfully it's all mostly back in order now. Going to get some Sir Walter for the big brown patch in the middle of the lawn. Too bad I didn't get more of the garden bed cleaned up before pregnancy became too much for me. Oh well. 

For the last 3 weeks I've been on the count down. Reading the bible chronologically through the year has meant that it's been easy to keep track of really, because the last 3 weeks have read Week 50, Week 51 and Week 52 at the bottom of the page. Now I'm there. Yesterday was day 365 and the count down is over.

Now the waiting begins.