Thirty before 30!

I stole this idea from a friend's blog, I've also had a look on google and it appears to be quite a popular idea. Not that that's important really. Anyway...here is my list of thirty things I'd like to achieve before I turn the big 3 0 (in no particular order):

1. Volunteer with a local charity for a day
2. Go snow skiing again and learn to snowboard (preferably without coming home in plaster this time)
3. Get a tattoo
4. Go back to the Barossa, McLarenVale and the Adelaide Hills
5. Put the outdoor spa in at home
6. Spend a weekend shopping in Melbourne with Mum
7. Take Darryl to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef (don't even know if he would enjoy it but it's something that everyone has to do at least once!)
8. Get back to my pre-IVF weight
9. Host a black tie dinner party at home
10. Get more professional photos taken together
11. Create a photo journal for an entire month
12. See a sunrise over the ocean - champagne breakfast style
13. Go white water rafting in North Queensland
14. Get back to my old fitness level and run 5km daily with Darryl
15. See a live musical or the ballet
16. Have a whole month off work
17. Grow my hair long again
18. Take a road trip with no set destination
19. Buy a Saeco coffee machine for home
20. Take some cake decorating classes
21. Go vegetarian for at least a week
22. Go to New Zealand, see Fox Glacier and catch up with old friends
23. Start planning our trip to Ireland
24. Surround ourselves with only people who enrich our lives
25. Buy a new car
26. Read a book from front to back in one sitting
27. Print all of our digital photos and put them into albums
28. Start my own vegie/herb garden and don't kill it
29. Fall pregnant and carry a happy and healthy baby to full term.
30. If we're lucky enough to complete our own family, do another IVF cycle to donate eggs to another couple struggling with infertility.

There is also one more which apparently "needs" to be mentioned and that's to conquer my fear of geckos. Yes, those tiny little lizzard things that somehow creep into your house and sit there and stare at you. There's a few people who think it would be rather amusing so I'll list it here. Just to humour them. I think they'll forever creep me out but you never know!

Two cars and a double garage...

Nine years ago (or thereabouts) I met my now husband. Since then I've learnt to accept that double garages were never meant to house two cars. Hell, in some instances they're not even meant to house one! All jokes aside, I love my husband to bits but he has a tendency to accumulate useless possessions (from here on in referred to as crap....there I said it, he collects crap). The last five years of living together have been fantastic but interesting. I don't think there's been a single time we've been able to fit both cars into our garage. I should also add that there's also not been a single time we haven't had a double garage. So yes, we should have had ample room for two cars.

Ever since we knew the completion date for our house was getting closer I'd been making little comments here and there about how great it would be to fit two cards in the garage in the new place. Sometimes they were noticed, other times ignored but I persisted (continuously) until Darryl would just laugh. To this day I'm not sure if he laughed because he had no intention of having the garage tidy enough for two cars, whether he laughed because he thought I was kidding or whether he laughed because it was that or belt me over the head with something just to shut me up. In the end I decided it needed to be made quite clear that I was serious. So I did something I'm not entirely proud of.....I threatened a skip bin. I had the motivation, I had the time with two weeks off to move/unpack and I had the opportunity to have the skip here, filled and gone all in the one day before he got home from work.

Fast forward to last night...we've been living in our lovely new home for 10 days and we've finally finished unpacking all of the boxes, garage included. Everything has a home and anything that didn't have an appropriate spot got dumped, even some of Darryl's crap he'd collected over the years. And while I'm sure I still have an unused fire twirling stick, amble spare bike tyres for a pushbike we don't own and countless tins of touch up paint for our old house, I can also now park two cars in the garage at once AND close the door. Bliss!

Builders, Boxes & Bubblewrap

I've spent the last 12 months dealing with (read: arguing with, yelling at and trying to coordinate the most disorganised of) tradesmen to get this house close to the point of finished. I had a wonderful image in my head. Moving would be fantastic. Finding a new home for all of our things would be exciting and it would just generally be wonderful to be in the new house whether there were still a few boxes around or not. Fast forward to today...the house is finished except for the landscaping, which is about 3 more weeks away, and I've decided if I see another box I may scream.

Life in the new house has been fairly busy as any normal person would have expected mid-move. I have wrapping, packaging tape and boxes shoved in cupboards that should contain more essential things like clothes or food. My car doesn't stand a chance of fitting in the garage because, it too, is full of boxes and other random packaging materials. The house is full of dust and dirt because of the construction in the area. And rather than my image of perfectly manicured lawns and gardens I may as well be living in the middle of a desert surrounded by dirt and dust and an overgrowth of weeds.

When Darryl walked in the door this afternoon I was vacuuming the floor for the fourth time today with a plan of then dusting the outside of the cupboards to get the gyprock dust off them. He went running not long after...I think to avoid a meltdown about dirt that he could clearly see coming. I sat down for a minute admiring the rooms that I have managed to unpack and sort over the last few days and I realised I needed to look at the bigger picture. Just under twelve months ago we were terribly unhappy in a rental property after being in our own home for 4 years. We tossed up our options and signed a contract on a block of land. It was a pile of dirt that I couldn't, in my wildest dreams, have imagined being brand new house...our brand new house.

Since then I've had meltdowns over shades of brown. I've had screaming matches about skirting boards, nightmares about variations of render colours and all sorts of abnormal things. But none of that matters anymore. We're in our own brand new home, our home that we planned together from start to finish. Suddenly the sense of achievement far outweighs the dusty floors, cars stuck outside for another month, useless tradesmen and cupboards full of crap. None of that really matters anymore and all the stress was oh so worth it.

About Me

I was born in Brisbane on 30th May 1985, the only child to two wonderful parents.

I started working when I was legally of age (14+9 months)and within a few years met my now husband. We bought a house on the northside of Brisbane in May 2004 and moved in together. We were engaged 6 months later and married on August 2005.

We've been seeing a fertility specialist for quite some time in the quest to have a precious baby. To date our arms are still empty and our hearts somewhat broken after a number of failed IVF cycles, two miscarriages and numerous tests resulting in nothing we didn't already know.

In May 2008 we sold our first home and chose to rent while we invested our money and focused all of our attention on our IVF journey. A few months later the property market crashed along with interest rates so we decided to buy a block of land and build a brand new home for a fresh start.

Fast forward to now, and we've just moved into our new home. The place is a mess of boxes and packaging materials but we're having a ball finding new homes for all of our belongings.

I started this blog to journal life in our new home, the fun times with friends and family and, I guess most of all, our quest to have a perfect little bundle of our own.