I’m sitting in the still cold morning air, drinking my coffee and listening to those crazy white cockies carrying on while they’re trying to balance on the power line that runs from the house to the main lamp post. I don’t think they realize that 1 – Busso is three hours south and 2 – that power lines aren’t the best thing to be swinging on with fifty of your mates!

Finishing my last gulp of coffee, I’ve just sent Francis back to bed to keep warm as he’s had the flu this last week and still has a lingering cough. No point him sitting in the cold living room with me when his room is toasty and warm with the heater on. As a ten year old he’s a pretty easy going kid despite the last few years being challenging for him. I’m so glad he’s finally finding his feet again and more settled in himself. He really is my hero, for many reasons.

While the rest of the house (and its occupants) sleep well into the morning, I’m thinking about what needs to be done today once breakfast is over with of course. Being as it’s Sunday there’s always the meeting first at 10am that will take us through to lunch time. (Zoom today so as not to take the flu to the hall.) Then there will be the usual lunch debate and trying to decide who wants what. After lunch is when I escape to the backyard no matter the weather, to see how my veggie garden is doing.

Having put in seedlings about four weeks ago now, I have to say everything is doing really well, depste the neglect the garden took over the summer. In hindsight, planting out summer crops with Dad being so sick and then passing away probably wasn’t the best idea being as my heart and soul weren’t really in it at the time. I should have put the beds to rest through the summer and come back to them in autumn. As it was I did leave them for a couple of months after pulling every dead plant out. However, I didn’t do anything to help keep the soil healthy and it suffered and dried out. Thankfully I’ve learned enough over the last few years to know how to revive the soil, so that’s what I did. I topped up the beds with fresh cow manure, mushroom compost, herb and veggie mix plus more compost (all organic of course), layered in rock minerals, rooster booster, molasses and seasol, watered everything in and voila! fresh revived veggie beds ready to go. I let everything sit for a week and kept watering my fresh soil so that all the goodness from the ingredients had a chance to help the lower layers that had suffered through the heat of a typically hot Perth summer and a ton of neglect.

Now four weeks later the majority of my seedlings are thriving extremely well and I’ve only lost one broccoli seedling, one marigold and one coneflower to snails. Not too bad when I think of last years battle with snails, what a nightmare that was.

So once the obligatory seedling check is done and I’ve opened up the shed and say a quick hello to Dad and Pops tools that are all around me, I’ll sit in the sun for ten minutes soaking up some winter rays while watching Felix (our part dog, part cat, cat….otherwise known as catdog) run, jump, chase bees and all other crazy antics he gets up to. He really is quite entertaining, Hubby will no doubt come outside to see what I’m up to and to fuss over Felix and give him a cuddle. I find it quite interesting that I was the one who wanted a kitten, went and picked him up, named him and yet it’s Chris he loves the most……traitor!

Not every Sunday do I paint furniture but today I’m hoping to finish painting chest of drawers for Francis that I started on Friday. It’s going to look amazing in Navy Blue and Gold trim, I can’t wait to see the end result. Francis has already picked out the hot air balloons and time pieces he wants on his drawers and I’m loving the ones he’s chosen. I think it’s great to let him have input into the styling of his furniture as it brings out his creative side and gets him to visualise what his drawers will look like when finished. He definitely ha my taste and has already been quite vocal about having gold knobs on the drawers, which I’m completely on board with.

The rest of the afternoon will be spent hanging out together as a family, followed by dinner and an early night for Francis being as he’s been so sick with the flu.

Sunday night is date night for Chris and I though we rarely go out and have our evening at home with a put together charcuterie board, tea, coffee and a movie. Once Chris has spent thirty minutes scrolling every streaming patform and finally settling on something we both want to watch….then it’s date night.

Overall Sundays are a pretty relaxed day and while there’s always something that needs to be done, it’s done with a slower pace than the rest of the week. Almost as slow as being back in the country.