The last couple of months have been filled to the brim with family and celebrations. Of course in this space the highlights reel is usually shown, but I don't want to forget these moments!

Life has been crazy, full, hard, fun, exhausting and amazing all at once.  So thankful for this precious family we get to do life with...

Our school put on the most amazing production recently that two of our children took part in.  It was stunning, and I was so proud of all the kids that took part in the show!  

We love our staff.  So sad to recently farewell one of our team (Nina), but glad she's still around and so looking forward to meeting this new bubba later this year!!

I made dumplings recently for the very first time - and they were so yum!!  This time we made pork dumplings... they did take some time (we were feeding 7 people!) but it was so worth it!  Keen to try chicken dumplings next time!

Our master bedroom is finally finished and we love it!  

This room is the only room in our bungalow home with low ceilings as it was a later addition to the house, but it has a lovely view out of the windows (originally sourced from our local girls high school - same as the ones in our kitchen here) and access to an ensuite (something we'd never experienced until moving here!).

We've kept the same paint colours as throughout the house (paint details at the end of this post) and decided to keep a light and bright feel to the room with a white duvet cover, light wooden bedroom suite and the usual quirky decor additions.

Sadly, I never took any decent before photos, but found a few random ones to highlight some of the "before" features we couldn't wait to fix...

Like the lovely stained ceiling, mismatched and ripped curtains, pink trim around the wardrobe doors, the dusty, cane light fixture and antique light fixtures above our bed and the fact that the bedroom door opened into the wall first...

Before:

And after:

I'm long overdue for a lately post! So much has happened in the past  couple of months including our eldest son getting engaged which is so exciting! We've also been through a very difficult time as a family with Symon's mum in hospital... so there has been a lot of tears and our hearts have ached, but life goes on despite and there have been many things to be thankful for during this time. So as we take one day at a time, here are some of the things we are so thankful for...

Our son is engaged! You may have noticed a beautiful young lady turning up in the blog posts and my Instagram over the past wee while. Well Jasher & Monique are engaged now and we are looking forward to their wedding next year!  We love having Monique as a part of our family already! You can check out his cute proposal here.

My Dad had a gathering of friends and family for his 70th and I'm so glad I got some photos of all the immediate fam... 

Symon and I recently celebrated 23 years married. Love this guy so much. 

Recently our church took a large group down to attend Life conference in Auckland. We had an amazing time together and enjoyed guest speakers like Kim Walker-Smith, Charlotte Gambill, Joel Holm etc. We even had time to squeeze in visiting Hello Friends & Allies & Kelly Tarlton's on the way home..  

Delicious things have been created... and consumed... 

We joined the gym! Watch this space... 😂 

And finally, our youngest has started playing netball. None of our other kids have ever played netball before, so it was so much fun to watch her first game and see her team win 14 to 6! So proud - she played so well for a beginner!