Happy, Healthy and Here.

This is what Crayton and I talked about today...that the only thing that matters is that we are happy, healthy and here. Above and beyond that is all bonus. All the hours I wasted worrying about the stoopid stuff that Does Not Matter, I can't go back and do them over but I can, and do, approach life a little differently these days. I just love the freedom in not caring as much - I'm a self proclaimed expert in filtering out the insignificant like never before. We plan to make Happy, Healthy and Here our new catch-cry around here. I like it.

Speaking of really happy, I can't tell you how great today was! Finally this month, after years of waiting, our gorgeous friend Laureen and her lovely family arrived on holiday from Canada and we got to meet up! Kate's brood also joined in for a beautiful afternoon at the beach where all our kids made for a lot of happy noise and chaos. Laureen is a super talented photographer with a camera bag well worth stealing - I'm pretty sure she's got some lenses in there Canon don't even know they've made. You can imagine the shop talk with us three girls together in one place.

Earlier in the day, my Macey borrowed my camera and declared he thought it was pretty fun being "photo boy". I think he does a great job considering the camera weighs more than him! Ivy was not well today but still manages to look cute - don't you love her toddlernap hair?




This makes me laugh.



This makes me swoon.


Lastly, already being at the beach on such a glorious day, it was the perfect place for Monique & Tony's shoot with Sam & Oli. How gorgeous are these boys? (Click for correct resolution).


A lovely way to end my lovely day!

S xx

I went shopping and I bought.

This week, I shopped. I'm sure I did other things but the shopping matters most.

What I saw: This positively gorgeous bunny from Danish company, Maileg. I'm not a stuffed animal kinda girl, not even as a child did I find them appealing but this is something totally irresistable - it was so big, amazing quality and those crochet shoes! I love bunnies and I love vintage so I was instantly smitten. Cheap, she was not so there she stayed. Sigh.
I then found on their website a Princess and The Pea..it's one of my favourite kids stories so it's another lust-have item. (I just can't imagine that bed arriving in one piece from Denmark).


Then of course I did the obligitary Ebay scout and found the perfect thing - an angel princess! She even has red spotty shoes and her wings are detachable. She's winging her way from the UK to me now :)


Also needed to get this and this for Ivish. She won't normally do denim but I figured the frill might just get a look in. The coat - what's not to love? Both from Big by Fiona Scanlan.


Welllll, you'd shop for her too if she looked at you like this:

(Pics courtesy of Buckets and Spades and Miss Kate.)

I also acquired some antique bone handle knives, heatwheats shaped like animals for the kids, the lastest copy of Frankie, a pretty nightie and some fine wine. Got to be happy with that :)

S xx

Scarlet & The Vintage Pram

Recently I was driving down a busy road when I saw a most beautiful vintage dolls pram outside a 2nd hand store. A hasty u-turn and sixty dollars later, she was mine. Even with the rust spots covering more of it than the paint does, I still love it.

A few days after my purchase I had a shoot booked with Scarlet and her Mummy and thought the pram would be perfect. Once I arrived at their beyond gorgeous home though, I thought twice about my rusty old prop and sheepishly left it in the car.

Little did I know, Marissa has a love for vintage toys and they were everywhere, including a pram much like my very own, sans rust! Along with these gorgeous crochet mushrooms and a zillion other beautiful props. Just add sweet Scarlet and there you have a photographers dream :)

S x

Blame it on the critters.

Angie and India came around under the guise of helping me sort through boxes stored in the shed. It was going quite well until the first glimpse of a large critter when we went fleeing and screaming out of there, half laughing half crying vowing never to return. (Mason happened to answer the phone to Kate just before this very event so she can vouch for the hysterical shreiks).

So, boxes abandoned. What else do bored girls do on a Saturday afternoon? Photoshoot of course.

Angie said she wanted to be Ivy for a day so we got out on the grass, twirled some skirt and stole some light. Can you believe Angie is actually India's MOTHER? Yummy Mummy doesn't remotely cover it.

Sunfrock on a Winters Day

I do love the sounds of tyres on our gravel driveway before 8.00am - it always means the courier is about to hand me a box of Beauty Full and I can never be sure just where it's coming from. I'm lucky enough to receive all manner of wonderful things from far away friends I've never met - I just wish I had enough time in the day to share them all here. One such box recently arrived from dear Krysta who knows I can't resist a decent frock - it came complete with matching beanie and card with a picture of kneesox! Heaven in a box :)

Although it's what we call Winter here, I had to pop it on Ivy on the weekend just to get a dose of Summertime and a few photos. Thankyou Krysta for the gorgeous frock and thankyou Ivy for the gorgeous you.

The Ebb & Flow

Yesterday, we attended a memorial service at the Mater for too many beautiful children, gone too soon. I had not intended to write specifically of it here but then something Angie wrote at Ava's memorial site last night and I wanted to share it. Her words are so beautiful and make me proud to call her sister. A beautiful way of marking this important day in my journal here. Angie, Aunty Angie, thankyou.

The Ebb and Flow..

My darling Ava. How you have changed my life.

How you have changed the lives of so many.

I can see so many positive things that have come out of the tragedy we have suffered in losing you and for the most part, I cling to those things like I’m holding on to the only tree in a flood of water rising. Sometimes that water rises so fast and I can do nothing to save myself from the emotion.

I don’t want you to be a little girl who is remembered in photographs on a memorial site.

I don’t want balloons to be let go.

I don’t want to light a candle for you in a far away continent in an ancient church, under the patron saint of children.

I don’t want to hear the sadness in my sisters voice on days when I know from just a tone, that her heart is breaking over and over.

I just want you to be here.

One day I watched you come out of nanny’s room in a long flowing dress. Your hair was loose about your face and it seemed to me like it was spun from gold. You had bare feet. You looked at me and in that instant I felt my heart fill with awe, with pride and with something else. A feeling I cant describe. As a mother of two children who I adore and cherish like they are gods greatest gifts – I looked at you in that moment and saw the most beautiful child I had ever seen.

When you were born, and your exhausted mummy and daddy could hold their eyes open for not a second longer, they trusted me to hold you in your first precious hours. We just peered into each others eyes. I am sure you were as in awe of me as I was of you. Everything was new for you. A face. A sound, a song. For weeks if not months after I saw you being born I looked at the world in wonder and awe, not unlike a newborn.

Today at the memorial ceremony, I looked on in disbelief that your photo was there with the other angels who had been lost at the Mater. The day you went isn’t something that needs to be spoken of right now, but I want you to know that as painful as losing you was I am honoured that you felt ok to make that journey with me beside you. I see just how sweet your precious soul is, that you would wait that moment that your mummy and daddy had to go to your brothers and sister – to protect their already broken hearts.

I remember your brothers swinging on the love swing at Nanny’s – with you in the middle between them. I sat perplexed, worried that they would swing too high.
I watch it like a movie in my mind.

There is nothing I can do but wait for the water to recede in these moments. I am drowning in my tears and the tears of your mother and father. I am drowning in the tears of all the parents who have lost the ability to hold their babies in their arms. When it does eventually go down, I will still be clinging to that tree, but perhaps I can take the hand of my sister, and of her loving husband who share that tree with me and we can hold each other instead. Maybe we can hold the hands of all the parents, aunties, uncles brothers and sisters, cousins grandparents and friends who also fear the inevitable rising tide of grief and together we can not feel so alone.

Thankyou to all the parents, families and friends who came to the Mater Hospital today to honour the memories of our babies taken all too soon.

Sheye I am so proud of you for the strength you showed today. I am proud of the strength you and Crayton show everyday of your lives.

- Aunty Angie

xx Sheye

Not Lost But Gone Before {Here No More, Here No More}

Here No More

Not lost but gone before
Here no more, here no more
Each day the long light dims and fades
Not lost but gone before

Creation sings mountains bring
Age is born through memory and lore
Upon a saw tall timbers fall
Here no more, here no more

The light shines close echos low
Of your sweet voice I weep and mourn
Upon a saw tall timbers fall
Here no more, here no more

Not lost but gone before
Here no more, here no more
Each day the long light dims and fades
Not lost but gone before
Each day the long light dims and fades
Not lost but gone before

I find myself thinking today "wow, this week has been hard" . Then I remember last week was hard too. Oh, and the week before that. It's that day-to-day thing..not thinking too far forward or too far back so each day when I wake, I kind of forget that all the days since the third of february two thousand and seven have been just that. Varying Degrees of Hard. Right now, we're struggling through the how? How can Ava not be here? How can she not be playing with Ivy today? How can this be forever?

Crayton mentioned today that we needed to write something down for our children's children. For the first time, I realised that one day, they would be missing an Aunty. It made my eyes sting and I suddenly felt angry that I'd found a whole new reason to feel sad. How can she not be an Aunty one day? How did I miss that? How many more reasons will pop up and suprise me and make Ava's void a little bit bigger?

How can this be forever?

I went to the acupuncturist yesterday. It helps me remember. It's hard and it's sad and it's wonderful. One Saturday early last year, I woke with such dreadful ache and missing and certainty that I could not take another breath without my daughter beside me but more than anything, such fear that I would forget. In desperation, I rang an acupuncturist. I'd never been before. I cannot explain how or why acupuncture works but I do know that when I lay on that bed, my mind was so completely numb and all I needed was to remember through the haze. After not many minutes, it was if a slideshow began. A slideshow of Ava, one memory after the other. Her throwing me flowers, her swinging on her dresses in the cupboard, her wrapping her arms around my neck. Her chubby feet, the small of her back, her beautiful, beautiful, olive skin. It was such a relief, to find out that all my memories were still there tucked away for when I'd need them. I drove home that day with a lightness I had not had in weeks. I remember the dozens of butterflies out on that Sunny day. I felt hope.

Lately I am starting to feel scared that as Ivy gets older, her memories will replace Ava's so I went again. And once again, I found my memories of Ava still tucked safely away. They're all there. Her voice, her laugh, her everything. I can't explain how relieved that makes me but remembering also makes me take two steps back this week.

So today, I am not floating as high as some other days, today I'm a little closer to Ava and my thoughts continually wander back to her. And to everyone else who aches with the missing of those Gone Before. It's hard.

Poppy Love.

I had a great afternoon with Fran and Poppy last Friday, trekking around Gold Coast hills and valleys in search for the perfect spot to shoot. Fran was very patient while I continually got lost in unknown terrain - luckily we were around her old stomping ground and she managed to point me in the right direction more than once. Even with a navigator lovingly (or not) called Dianne, I find myself lost once every ten minutes.

Poppy is almost exactly Ivy's age and it was funny to see her behave just like my own - 2 is, amongst other things, pretty damn cute. Thankyou lovely girls, for much fun and frivolity.

Here's a little more sunflare than the norm but Fran's as obsessed as I am.




**I'm currently looking for models for a commercial boudoir-esque shoot coming up. If you're a bright young thing interested in participating, please email me asap. Obviously, nothing but tasteful and beautiful is the objective.

Ripples {Or Not}.

These days, we talk of ripples. I'm not sure I totally believe in psychics, as such..I've seen John Edward in person and came away umm. bored. I've had a few readings in my time, predictions that I would leave my younger, fair boyfriend for the older olive one (I did)...another woman mentioned when I was 20 that my third child was very faint and she could not say why...I guess we remember the insights that came to pass but they still doesn't convince me entirely.

Three months to the day after Ava left, we visited a woman quite some distance away who came recommended. We took someone elses appointment but did not tell her in advance, she had no idea to even expect us letalone who we were. We sat with her for three hours, telling her nothing. She spoke in depth about many facets of our lives with great accuracy, our jobs, our families, our future..I could not deny it, she was good. I waited anxiously for news of Ava, but it did not come. Over and over she said she could see three children but feel four. At the end of the reading she asked me if I wouldn't mind clarifying why she was getting that confusing message and I explained our circumstances. She was not suprised Ava had not come through, it was so early on and said just to give it time. Since then I've become a little more afraid of going to readings - I'm nervous about hearing the wrong thing from the wrong person. I think I'll just wait until the day Allison Du Bois can see me.

So, back to ripples. Before last February, for a long time, I would wake at night with the same thought..this awful little movie that would play through my head and wake me out of my sleep.. the simple vision of me walking out the back door of our house, along the walkway and around the corner only to find something terrible had happened to one of our children. My movie would screech to a halt right there..unable to process any further past the "what if" scenario that we parents all fear.

It drove me crazy, the broken sleep and the fretful paranoia. I forced myself to start pushing the thoughts out of my head when I'd wake and in time it stopped. I can't ignore the fact that that only a short while after all of this, I did in fact walk out the door and found Ava only a few meters from where my night movie took me. And I was every bit as frozen and panicked and hopeless as I had awfully imagined I would be.

Through this time, we also bought a new car. I had pested for it..my "dream car" so to speak..and Crayton was happy to go along with it, as long as it was not black. He had a "thing" about black cars, a "bad luck"thing, and we had many many discussions over it...seeing as I wanted no other colour. In the end, I won out and black it was. He was never that happy about it but agreed it looked good. While we know the colour of our car made little difference to the temperature inside that day, we can't help but wonder if Craytons paranoia was a "ripple" reaching back.. a hazy insight that one day, a black car would change our lives? It could be nothing more than silly superstition but we do wonder.

When you lose a child, you analyze everything. You look back over for signs and warnings in the hope that going forward, you could prevent it ever happening again. It's not possible, of course, but you try anyway.


Apologies for the slow blogging at the moment, I'm so busy with proofing - I'll share some images throughout the week..Promise.
S xx