Nursery Rhymes

I seriously suck at nursery rhymes - as in that I don't know any of them.

Luckily, in 2011 we have this very awesome thing called YouTube, which lead me to this video

I remember singing this a lot a few years back as it gets stuck in your head, though I always thought it was about a clock personally. But according to YouTube it is about a bird who gets all of its appendages plucked off one by one. How rather disturbing, but totally addictive. Maybe I just won't teach our child French and they will never know.
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Planting the seed

I brought this planter 6 years ago, originally for the garden in the outdoor area, and made it into a fountain. Those plants died a tragic death, and the planter got moved to the front yard. I have managed to replace the plants in it more times that I care to admit, but I love how it looks. This time we have a gardenia surrounded by pansies.

Maybe this lot will last longer that 6 months?

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A Gassy Issue

So we left off with the wait for the gas company to do their thing, and the plumber ordering the heater.

When I rang the gas company I was told it would take 4-6 weeks to have a new connection completed, after which the plumber could install the pipework, and then they would send us the meter for the plumber to install. I kind of expected a bit of a wait, so that was ok, I was more glad that we decided to do this in autumn rather than wait for winter when the baby arrived.

So imagine my surprise when after a week, the gas connection man rang and said he was going to start digging up our lawn that afternoon, and would be back a few days later (it was a Friday) to get the pipes bored under the street to connect our house to the mains.

When that was done, our plumber did his thing and we rang the gas company to order our meter. It was actually when I was sick with a cold and the husband was away, and the very lovely lady at TXU Energy put an urgent status on our metre for me when I explained I was sick, had no heating, and was pregnant. Unfortunately the man who finished the ordering of our metre did not care in the least and maintained he would not be making our metre urgent and we would be waiting for 5 business days for our metre. This was slightly concerning as the plumber was due to come back in 2 days before he went on holidays to finish the job for me.

The husband took a day off work when the plumber was due to come, and was most suprised when the plumber commented about the metre on the side of our house - neither of us had noticed it had been installed the day prior and it had infact arrived as an 'urgent' order!

Anyway, I went to work that day, and came home to this sight

My curtains were hiding a lovely suprise

A Rinnai 1004FTR heater!

We just need to have the curtains altered to clear the top of the heater, as currently when it is in use we can't close them. But in the meantime, I am loving our programable heater that switches on 10 minutes before I get out of bed in the morning and automatically turns off when I leave for work at 7.55am each morning. We even have it set up to turn on at 5.20pm each night (I get home at 5.30pm) and off at 10pm each night.

It wasn't cheap (coming in at just under $3,000 fully installed), but it is well worth the cost.



Oh, and there is another fan of the heater in our household Pin It

WTF Ikea

Someone recently pointed out to me that Ikea have online shopping in certain states in Australia, which is terribly unfair if you ask me.

What was even more unfair when I spotted this price difference (you may have to click on them to see it bigger):

VICTORIA

 SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Apparently South Australia's are entitled to a $20 price reduction on the same product. What is with that?

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Baby Shower Gifts

We all know I love shopping, so I am more than a little excited that several of my closest friends are pregnant, and not only do I get to help shop for them, I also have quite a calendar full of baby shower dates.

Most of my friends have found out the sex of their babies, however they aren't telling the greater public, so it means I am on the hunt for gender neutral gifts. I suddenly realise how annoying it is when someone (ie me) doesn't know the gender of the baby, as it makes shopping a very hard experience.

I am currently loving these burp cloth and onsie sets from Mac and Me

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Did you know?

That my blog now has it's own domain? www.aprilcandice.com will now get you to my little blog.

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Nappies

A while back I mentioned how I planned to use modern cloth nappies, choosing to go with Bumgenius Elemental. Well it turned out I was a sucker for punishment, as I ordered them from the US with a mail forwarding company sending them to my house. Which was awesome - except the dickhead of a courier delivered them to someone elses house and couldn't reclaim them. I was less than impressed, especially when they finally admitted liability 2 days after my shipping insurance claim time ran out! Eventually I received a refund for the cost of the nappies, and with that back in my bank account, I vowed to only buy nappies in Australia.

So, along this saga which took place over almost 2 months, I changed my mind on what type of nappy I wanted to use, deciding on using Itti Bitti Tutto's

I still love how they can do from newborn (apparently) to 20kg. And they had awesome colours in minkie fabrics. *Swoon*

On a google search hunt, I came across Nurture Nappies, who offered the best special for bulk packs of Tutto's - $190 for 6 Tutto's with free postage - a massive saving of $32 which was almost the cost of one nappy! I was sold. So I placed my order, and continued on my merry way.

By the time I got home I had an email confirming my purchase, and another from Nikki stating that my chosen colours were out of stock. I had several options to choose between, I could wait out the stocking period, change my colours, or cancel my order. I was most impressed, as most companies only ever let you know these things when you ask. I decided to wait out the restocking period (10 days) as I really wanted these particular colours.

When my nappies came into stock, Nikki emailed me and let me know they had been shipped, and I would receive them within 48 hours. Yay! I expected a delivery on Monday or Tuesday, but when nothing showed up, I checked the tracking online. Imagine my shock when it said they had been delivered already! Oh no, not again!

I quickly emailed Nikki, who contacted the shipping company on my behalf. Turned out that I was outside their express delivery system and that my parcel had been forwarded to Australia Post for delivery. As it turned out, a further half hour after I sent my email my parcel arrived! Not something that was Nurture Nappies fault, as who would have expected the courier company to send it via Australia Post an hour from its delivery destination?

Nurture Nappies were so lovely to deal with, I couldn't recommend them highly enough. I highly recommend them to anyone who is willing to listen now, and look forward to shopping with them for my next nappy stash.

Oh, and just for interests sake, this is my current stash

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