U2 the greatest show in the world

Last weekend Jason and I attended the greatest show in the world- U2 (along with 60,000 other fans). However, it nearly wasn't to be with Jason locking the work garage door opener, his swipe card for work and the tickets in the car. For about 20 minutes we were wondering what to do as Jason couldn't get hold of any work mates. Finally we managed to get hold of Al, who was going to come down and save the day for us... and low and behold, someone came out of the building and we were in. Crisis averted.

The show started with Jay-Z rocking the crowd, for a rapper it was really good and he and his band really got the crowd going.

After the opening act we had about 30 minutes to wait.... until... U2 kicked things off with a rendition of Beautiful Day, on a beautiful warm night with the moon glowing overhead.

During the start of the show, Bono drew a comical analogy between cricket and rock and roll, referencing the day's Ashes Cricket showdown between Aussie and England. After likening each of the band members to cricket players, he got to the point. His observations that the Aussies and the Irish shared an "overwhelming desire to stick it to the Brits"... it was pretty funny and got great cheers from the crowd.

There was a great blend of old and new songs, including I will follow, Pride (In the Name of Love), Mysterious Ways, I still haven't found what I'm looking for, With or Without you, One, Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Walk On.

U2's 360 tour is probably the biggest ever and most impressive concert Perth has seen. It was visually epic, with Bono at one stage wearing a laser jacket and many cameras hidden all over the alien-like claw capturing every moment while he and The Edge strutted a range of catwalks allowing the masses to get up close and personal with the stars. Here's some shots of the stage:
One lucky lady will never forget her close encounter with Bono, after being pulled up onto the stage only to have him lay in her lap as he sang the romantic In A Little While. While she looked suitably stunned, he slow danced with her, only to leave her with a kiss on the back of the hand.

Here's a couple of shots of the band rocking it out:So, Poppy has now been to Crowded House and U2 and I was VERY tempted by Kings of Leon and Santana (both in March). But we decided against it.

All I can say is, what a great evening and if you get a chance, I recommend seeing U2 live!!! Wicked.

Week 19 baby belly

Well after a couple of requests I have posted the first of the baby belly shots...here I am at 19 weeks and 1 day. Nearly halfway there now.

I had my 18 week check up on Thursday and my doctor said that Poppy is lying on the right, and you can see that my belly button is being pulled that was as well...

Mmmmm Pizza

So last weekend my brother (a chef) and sister in law (who is also pregnant) came to stay. We had a great few days but today's post is all about the new pizza stone. On the Saturday morning we were all trying to decide what to have for dinner. We all decided on home made pizza. For one, it meant we could use the new kenwood for the base. Also, Jason has been wanting a pizza stone for quite some time.

So after a day out at Fremantle we made a quick stop at the kitchen warehouse for a pizza stone and a pizza paddle and then coles for some ingredients. Jane and Quentin were after a potato, garlic and choriza pizza, Jason was after a meat lovers and bbq sauce, and I wanted pumpkin and cherry tomato.

Expecatations were high and they were exceeded, the pizza stone worked brilliantly on the bbq and the food was just delish!!!

Here's Quentin making the pizza, the potato and chorizo finished product and the meat lovers in the making (on the bbq). No photos of the pumpkin and cherry tomato pizza and I was soooooo hungry and it was soooo good.
The following night, while Jane and Quentin were at a wedding, Jason made us garlic bread pizza style on the bbq for dinner. Yummo. I can see a whole summer of homemade pizzas ahead of us.

I think Jason's summary of the kenwood mixer (my Christmas pressie) was priceless as well - in his words - its bought nothing but joy so far!!

My first pavlova

This weekend we had guests over for dinner (fellow kiwis) so I decided that I wanted to make a good traditional kiwi dessert. The mighty pavlova. I had never made a pavlova before so I wanted a tried and tested recipe from my mum. She gave a few good tips and tricks, especially as I do not know my new oven yet.

As well as the great recipe I had the great new kenwood mixer Jason bought me for Christmas (only given early for the sake of the pavlova). So between the great recipe, the FANTASTIC new kenwood mixer and a good reliable pavlova making oven I achieved the following result:
Not too bad for a first effort really. It tasted as good as it looked as well. I did toss up between mango and passionfruit with berries for the topping, but good old berries won the challenge on the day.

The journey so far...

So here I am, 16 weeks into our first pregnancy and I thought that it would be a great time to recap our journey so far.

I think it will be very fair to say that Jason has been ready to have children since we married 6 years ago. However, around the time that we married I started a new sport for me, triathlon. Not long into my triathlon career I made the New Zealand team which led to some new sporting goals (namely a medal at a World Championships). Additionally, we wanted to own our own house prior to having children.

We achieved one of these goals in 2006 with the purchase of our Pembroke rd property in Wellington.

The triathlon goal took a little longer. After 21st (25-29 age group), 17th (Elite), 10th (30-34), and 13th (30-34) placings at various triathlon world champs I finally achieved my medal goal with a Bronze medal at the 2009 Long Distance World Championships in Perth.

So once this goal was achieved, we still had a little time to wait prior to starting to try for our family, this next wait was to get all our health insurances in order, but essentially we were ready. We are living in a place that we consider to be very conducive to raising a family, we are in a good position financially and most of all, we are both ready to embark on this exciting phase of our lives.

Roll forward to August 2010, and we fell pregnant on our 6th Wedding Anniversary weekend. While trying to fall pregnant I was doing some casual training for a local half marathon. The weekend prior to our wedding anniversary I ran 65km in 3 days, with one of those sessions being a 30km run at faster than 5min per km pace.

Fast forward three weeks and (unbeknownst to me at that time) I was pregnant but I was INCREDIBLY tired and still on the start line for my race (unwillingly however, given how tired I was feeling). Anyway, I had to walk 7km into the race and from then on I walk/ran the remaining 14.1km. Hmmmm this was the first inkling that I may have been pregnant.

Mid the following week I was still feeling tired and had been suffering a fever (38.5 degrees) so I visited my doctor. She suspected pregnancy, so we had a blood test- which was negative. A day or two later I had a "hankering for burgers and fries" not a usual craving for me, but in hindsight a small sign.

The following Saturday I decided to take a home pregnancy test and:
At this stage I was pretty excited (and also nervous). Jason was also very excited. Over the next few days I took a few more home tests just to check that I was still pregnant (pretty conclusive evidence really):
You may recall Poppy was named to represent its size the day we found out- a poppy seed. The next size reference was a lentil, so I much preferred Poppy as a nickname over Lentil haha.

Once the pregnancy was confirmed via blood test at the doctors it started to sink in that our journey towards parenthood was well and truly underway.

So pregnancy for me has meant extreme tiredness, more so than when I was training in my hardest weeks, and for some days all day nausea. I also had an unfortunate side-effect: insomnia. So in my early weeks I needed at least 4 hour nanna naps each weekend day and I had absolutely no energy to exercise at all (which for me has been a very tough thing to cope with).

For Jason, a pregnant wife means tiredness, crankiness, funny food cravings and aversions (I recently went off red meat!!!!) and quiet weekends at home.

Around week 9 we told all our immediate family the news of the impending arrival. Unfortunately not long after this I experienced some unexplained but reasonably severe cramping. This was when we got to see Poppy for the first time, we needed a scan to confirm viability- but we saw Poppy's heartbeat straight away. Phew.

The next stage was our nuchal translucency scan at 12 weeks 5 days, which checks for chromosomal disorders. During this scan it was truly amazing to see how much Poppy had grown. We could make out hands, feet, arms, legs and face. A week or so after our scan we got the results and we were very low risk for Downs Syndrome
(1:8695) and even more low risk for the other two chromosomal disorders tested.

Since around week 14 my symptoms have settled somewhat and I have been undertaking a little more exercise. Now I just feel very unfit after 14 weeks of minimal exercise. I aim for 4 exercise sessions a week at the moment and as my energy increases I will increase the number of exercise sessions a week.

So looking forward a couple of weeks - I have another check up at the GP in week 18, we have another scan in week 19 prior to heading to Queensland for Christmas and Poppy will be 20 weeks old on Christmas Day.

Crowded House at Sandalford Estate

Recently Jason and I had an afternoon/evening with Crowded House at Sandalford Estate Winery in the Swan Valley. I made some triple chocolate muffins and bacon and egg pie which we added to some good quality vintage chedder, gherkins, and crackers as well as some good scorched almonds and our picnic was set.

Neil Finn hit the nail on the head when he said "what a wonderful place to be on a Sunday evening". And it truly was, the temperature had dropped to a balmy 25 degree evening (well down from the 36 degree day) so we had a beautiful breezy, warm spring evening with a fantastic sunset.

The beautiful sky just added to an all-round lovely evening, with a great venue that catered for the 8000 plus crowd with ease, creating a chilled, relaxed atmosphere.

Here we are with Kent and Fiona, just chilling, eating our picnic food and listening to the warm up bands.

A couple of stage shots and some of the fantastic surrounds we were treated to. The lake and fountain was a lovely touch.
Neil Finn introduced himself as: “Neil, full of zeal. Neil, Neil, lemon peel from Te Awamutu.” His sense of humour was evident as well, encouraging the audience to wave to one of many planes that flew overhead towards the airpor: “We couldn’t afford fireworks so we asked Qantas to supply a plane,” he joked after playing Four Seasons in One Day.

We were treated to some old Crowded House favourites, i.e Don't Dream it's Over, When You Come, Locked Out and Distant Sun, ensuring plenty of crowd sing-a-longs and dancing, as the signs requested:
Finally, the last song of the night one of my favourites. During this song the crowd raised their mobile phones on Finn’s request, waving them slowly above their heads as all the lights were turned off. And with that, Better Be Home Soon boomed out. It was a magical moment.
All in all it was a great night out and we both had a lovely time.

Movember

The month formerly known as November is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men's health.

Jason's work has a team and he is starting to look somewhat Magnum PI ish, or even a little like Goose from Top Gun.

What else is there to say really.

All about Jason...

So all my blogs seem to be about me, so this post is just about Jason and a few of the things that he does to keep himself occupied here in WA. Jason works at a small niche company called Yambay. From their website "Yambay is a leading provider of field-service, job scheduling and mobile platform products servicing enterprise customers from the resource, utilities and field-service sectors". In my words (and Jason will probably tell me I have it wrong haha) Yambay provide the mobile software that companies suh as Western Power (electricity transmission and distribution) use for fault call outs. Jason spends about 3 full days a week down at Western Power in East Perth and the other 2 days at his main office in Subiaco.

Here's a few shots of jason over the last couple of years.

In terms of recreation, Jason has a few things to keep him occupied. Firstly and foremostly (well it takes up mst his time anyway) Jason has a passion for his computer and his online games. Some nights I have to get up and remind him that its 2 or 3 in the morning. Here's Jason playing. His headphones have him connected with other members of his playing group (clan). They all talk to each other. It was a bit weird at first hearing him talk (seemingly to himself) in the other room, but now I am used to it.Jason did a lot of martial arts growing up and recently he has headed back to it. This time to do brazilian jiu jitzu (BJJ) two nights a week. This is a martial art, combat sport and a self defense system that focuses on grappling and ground fighting (thanks wikipedia).

It teaches that a smaller, weaker person can successfully defend against a bigger, stronger assailant by using leverage and proper technique—this is by applying joint locks and chokeholds to defeat the other person.

This is Jason's gi hanging on the line drying out after a night of BJJ (I wasn't allowed a photo of him in it). You will also see the BBQ in the background, Jason is a whiz at BBQ cooking.Next up is Jason's green fingers and his love of bansai. Here is a sample of his plants out in the garden on the $5 table from the recycling centre. The big one in the bag was bought to celebrate Poppy and will stay in the bag for at least another year or so while it develops.
Here are a couple of the smaller bansai, with many, many years of growing ahead of them.
Finally, Jason plays water polo for the Melville Water Polo Club, this club is amazing, they have their own swimming pool, right on the edge of the Swan River (near Fremantle). See below for a shot of the pool. Jason plays once a week and trains once a week. His team is pretty good, often winning 12 or 13 goals to 1. Jason does lots of other things but these are the main ones for the moment. See ya next time.

A new addition to the family is on the way...

Hi there,

Well the blog title says it all really. Jason and I are expecting an addition to the family around 14 May 2011. We had the 13 week scan today and the following are a few pictures of little Poppy (as Baby Papps is called at the moment). Poppy was named to represent its size the day we found out- a poppy seed. Poppy is now 69.9mm long!!!

Here's a photo of Poppy's heart beat, sitting at around 134 BPM.

This is relaxed Poppy, feet up on the wall of the uterus and hands behind the head. No doubt that so far Poppy's taking after Jason in this shot.
Poppy has two normal arms and hands, if you look closely on the right, thats a thumbs up.
The arms crossed over from above.
Finally the spine.
SO all in all, everything is normal and healthy and where it should be.

From now on the blog that used to be all about triathlon will no doubt become all about little Poppy and the progress through the next 27 more weeks.

Time to smell the roses... literally

Hi there... so the last blog post was all about our new house. What it didn't show was the garden. We are lucky enough to have about 12 really well established roses in excellent condition (after we sorted out the aphids that is). They are just starting to come out now- the whites and yellows are out (as you will see from the photos below) and the pinks, reds and oranges are really close to flowering.
Its really been lovely having a garden to tend again, the other morning I did some weeding before work and Jason really has inherited a green thumb as well.