It's been a busy few days... training, gardening and generally being run off my feet! We've all had this buggering chesty cold thing going on which doesn't help.

Thursday we spent a lot of time at the cemetary at Grandpa's grave. It's such a surreal thing being there. We spent some time just sitting and talking about him, what we'd tell him if he was here now, how we wished he could be here to see Laurent and arranging the flowers etc. After a time we walked around the rest of the cemetary talking about Grandpa and looking at the old tombstones. A lot of them are from 1860-1890's and so many of them are of young children which I found very sad. I can't even imagine the pain their families must have felt. All of which had me spending the rest of the evening pondering how transient things really are, how the important things in our lives aren't the material ones or works but the people we leave behind us. There was a point when Nicole (a friend of the family's) had commented to us after we picked up the boxes of Grandpa's belongings at the nursing home that it (the boxes) weren't much to show for 97 years of living. We've just now finished going through those boxes, not because there was a great many of them but because it was difficult to go through them and admit he was really gone and wouldn't be coming back for them. His real legacy though was never in how many things he had but in being a father to his Francoise whose legacy is in Nicolas, who in turn brought Laurent into the world. (Okay, so he had a little help from me in that one... )

Friday ended up being a real handful. We had to take care of a bunch of bills, rates, car registration etc. We parked outside Vic Roads for the last one just before they were closing. They took forever of course and we came back to find we'd been ticketed! WTF! I look at the sign - 1 hr parking from 9:00 to 4:30. I look at the time the ticket was issued and it's 4:39! Talk about anal! I'm writing to protest as I really don't need a $107 fine at the moment, especially for being 9 minutes late because Vic Roads happened to be busy! Meanwhile, L didn't get any naps and was super cranky by the time I had Freestyle class, Sierra was well and truly bouncing off the walls because I didn't give her breakfast and her blood sugar was wonky so her brains were out the window. Class went fine except for apparently we were supposed to work on teaching a left spin which apparently I didn't hear so of course I didn't teach it. Urg. Stupid hearing loss! To be fair the building tends to have a lot of echo in it and the teachers are moving around across the building so it's not like they're in one nice quiet place for me to lip read! ;-) Ah well. We started working on it right away but Sierra was such a nutter she didn't really get it until we worked on it Saturday morning. Got it in about five minutes then! Silly girl. Silly me for not feeding her as well! Had to dash out for disposable nappies as I realized that I hadn't set L's cloth to wash and we were o-u-t. Ooopppppss.... drat!

Saturday we went to a birthday party for one of L's friends at playgroup who is going to be a year old. It was a beautiful day and the birthday boy makes a gorgeous one year old but it's also made me realize that Laurent is almost a year old as well! YIKES! It still seems amazing to me that I'm a mum at all, let alone being mum to a 1 year old. Holy heck, how did that happen?!? I also probably should solidify my plans for his party soonish as well and avoid my typical last minute freaking out. LOL Nic ended up getting home at 2:30 AM and so he was zonked for much of the day today.

Today was mostly a pretty slow day. Nic and Laurent took a big long nap that let me get a lot of gardening (read: weeding) in. (For anyone who doesn't know, our garden is perpetually in need of weeding... just as fast as I get it out, it grows back!) Everything went really well the rest of the day as well until Laurent fell from where he was standing at the doors and hit his nose on the way down. I've been having nightmares about the hinges on these doors as they're right at his level and project out. They're a head wound waiting to happen and I've been bugging Nic about them for ages. I'm paranoid about them but sure enough today he hurt himself... my poor little bubba... he's got a cut on the underside of his nose from it. He was too shocked to even scream for a moment before he let out the biggest wail and I could see blood welling up. It only bled a bit for a moment and he was trying to grab and eat the tissue so he's not traumatized but it gave me a scare seeing him hurt on the stupid hinge after how much I've worried about it. So that is now on the list of things to fix tomorrow and I'm heading to bed before I faceplant on the keyboard even though I *STILL* need to reply to about a dozen e-mails from friends and family!