Hi dear friends and family,

The weather is a little on the cold side today, overcast and drizzly. Hence the reason why I'm blogging this afternoon  and enjoying time listening to my iPod and some cool music . We have had the other type of brilliant weather over the past couple of weeks: sunny, warm which goes along nicely with the longer days we are seeing.

Today we've caught up with some of our friends in Australia. One of our close friends turned 8 years old yesterday and it was terrific to hear Rachel's excited voice and all her news - at times like that we just really miss Australia so much. I got to catch up a little with my friend Janette and tried to keep her for as long as I could from the doing her Sunday night ritual of ironing for the week - yeah sorry about that Janetteso   but what are friends for, and it was great to chat about family and history! 

As some of you know Marcel will be in Australia soon to walk his sister down the aisle(!!) and making the most of this visit back to Australia I've been doing a bit of ordering for our homeschool (which will save us heaps on postage) - my mum has been the recipient of all these packages .... and had the 'honour' of opening them all up! Now that was a totally new experience for me of having someone else being the first to take the new purchases out of their wrappings LOL! All is good and everything seems to be there and mum did a great job of working out what was what

This week has been an unusally full week with having people over for dinner - it's just the way it worked out - we had a family from our old neighbourhood over, also a couple from next door on another night and then Marcel's brother and fiance for some seafood. They were showing me how to cook BBQed salmon steaks - so lekker and a yummy sauce to go with it too. Last Sunday after chuch we went to a local park with family who also have four children so that was great and relaxed. And we had our small group get together on Friday night with a very yummy BBQ.

BBQing is definitely the way to go and something we plan to get into more. In the Netherlands they have these neat, little disposable-BBQs made of alfoil trays, with the necessary coals and grill-plate, ... still they don't seem like the real-deal BBQ to me but, hey, they work!

The girls were at Walibi World yesterday with their scout group, such a difficult, boring way to earn a new scout badge - NOT! They had such a blast and came home not the least bit tired - nice to have that sort of energy, eh?! Michael was at a sleepover on Friday night with one of his friends from scouts: we have had the same boy over here more lately for play-dates and a sleepover. Also, Michael has been getting very bad hayfever lately, yesterday the scout-leaders called us to come take him home as his face looked like he'd gone a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson(?). It's looking alot better this afternoon with the help of some hayfever drugs and eye drops.

Ps. ... I have a few more photos from May to put up, hopefully soon  .....