We joined the library!

This may sound completely obvious, but I highly recommend joining your local library!

When I was a kid we all belonged to the local library and borrowed books regularly.  When my now 6.5 year old was a baby, we used to go to Newtown library for Reading Time, but since we moved 5 years ago, we haven't actually visited the library at all.  Considering we're trying to reduce the purchases we make, it's crazy that we haven't been borrowing books from the library!

Day three of Winter school holidays, and one of my daughter's school friends had just been to the library and was showing her the books he borrowed this morning.  We had no firm plans today, so headed up to the library and joined.  We found five books she was excited to read, joined up and headed home.

Turns out there's also a whole online Library that comes with the membership too, where you can read online, or order books to be collected from your local library.  If you're in the 'Inner West Council', which used to be Marrickville Council, here's the link.

Now we have all the books we can possibly want to read, and don't have to waste money buying them all, or waste space storing them all in our house.

DIY Rainbow Crossing

Our backyard DIY Rainbow

Unless you've given up your phone and computer this past week, then you would have seen your Facebook feed and Twitter feed full of chalk rainbow images.

As a peaceful response to the Taylor Square rainbow crossing being removed, multitudes of people have hit the pavement drawing their own colourful rainbows with chalk.

Started over at the DIY Rainbow Crossings Facebook page. the trend has gone global as you can see by the images posted on their Facebook page and as reported by The Australian.


On Monday, I took the kids out into the backyard with a packet of chalk and we created a mini rainbow on the path.

Work in progress on Union Street
Photo: Helen Pentecost

Littlies chalking in Union Street
Photo: Helen Pentecost

As we started our little backyard rainbow crossing, I received a message from a neighbour across the road who had just bought a load of giant chalk to embark on a full size rainbow crossing on our street.  She invited us over to be part of it.

Union Street DIY Rainbow Crossing

The rainbow crossing on the street was a lot trickier as we had cars occasionally coming through, so we had the youngest kids colouring at the side of the road out of harms way and the adults / teenagers doing the middle.  Luckily we're on a small one way street so there wasn't too much traffic.

Union Street DIY Rainbow Crossing Complete!
Photo: Helen Pentecost

Station Street DIY Rainbow Crossing
Photo: Ellie McNamara

With such a warm and welcoming community in Tempe, there were a lot of us who wanted to get involved and spread the message of 'love is love'.  So about four or five streets in Tempe got on board and created there own DIY rainbow crossings. 

Toyer Street DIY Rainbow Crossing
Photo: Bettina Kaiser

Toyer Street DIY Rainbow Crossing
Photo: Bettina Kaiser

Brooklyn Street DIY Rainbow Crossing
Photo: Selina Martin

Another lovely example of the young families of the area working together for something they believe in and having fun with the kids at the same time.

Renovation / Life Balance

Sometimes it takes a moment of reflection to see the path you've been heading down recently.  And while breastfeeding, I'm forced to sit and reflect on things a lot!

This week I realised that while we succeed at maintaining a healthy work / life balance (most of the time!), it's trying to establish a more sustainable renovation / life balance that we need to work on.

And last weekend is the perfect example.  For a while we had wanted to replace the guttering at the front of the house to match the new roofing on the porch.  During the week I had a spare moment to ring around for quotes, and when we discovered how affordable it was, we decided to do it.  Mark measured up, I ordered it and Mark picked it up before work on Friday morning.  We had our neighbour booked in to help and we were all ready to go.

Then our TV antenna stopped working.  Another trip to Bunnings, and Mark's time spent researching.  I spent most child-free moments on Saturday painting the front door jam, and filling any gaps between the jam and the architrave.

Mark then spent Sunday morning up the ladder taking down the old antenna and replacing it with a shiny new one. I love shiny new things!

Then we all went to Ava's swimming lesson together as a family, before Mark spent the rest of the afternoon replacing the front guttering.


That was the weekend gone. And while the kids spent patches of time with their Daddy on Saturday and Sunday, had a nice time with me, saw their grandparents and had an afternoon in the park with friends, they didn't get big chunks of quality time with their Daddy and we didn't get much family time.





We all felt the effects of not spending time relaxing together, and have promised ourselves to try not to let the house take over again.

It's so easy to focus on the end result we want to achieve with the house, and loose focus of the time we need to spend together as a family along the way!

Welcome to Life in Tempe

I've been working on the new layout of this blog in secret for a while now, and gave myself the end of March deadline to make sure I didn't keep it secret indefinitely!

I had our web developer put a message on the Innocent Catering website saying that the new blog would be up at the end of March with a slightly different concept.  So here it is.

Originally, we had the Innocent Catering blog and I had my personal blog as two separate entities.  But I found it much easier to update and write posts for my personal blog, while the Innocent Catering blog ended up being a little boring to be honest.

So far, we've re-designed the Innocent Catering page and kept all the previous posts, and I'll gradually re-write the posts from my personal blog over here.

So why "Life in Tempe"?
I've spent the last 2 years being immersed in the building our Tempe based business, adding to our family, renovating our new house and becoming part of the Tempe community.  All activities seemed to be centred around this little close-knit suburb of the Inner West, so "Life in Tempe" seemed a natural fit.

Have a look around, I hope you like what you see so far, and please come back again to read more about what we've been up to.