A New Start

The past four months have flown by in the blink of an eye. 2011 finished with me leaving university life to work on the truck with my dad for a few months. We were running out of money after our house in QLD failed to sell. I worked for most of November, all of December, and all of January. It was nice to get back to uni and do some real work after all that time on the truck.

Abbie's Baptism

This week was looking like it would be terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad. Monday through Friday we went through the motions and did what was required to survive, but it didn’t feel particularly good – at all. We have weeks like that now and then.

Kylie’s mum arrived on Wednesday and the children were delighted to have her visiting with us. Her dad arrived Friday, and the children were even more excited to have two grandparents here. But overall Kylie, the children, and I had a largely forgettable week... until...

A Meaningful Insight

Last week while doing our family scripture study I felt inspired with a scriptural insight that taught me a great deal about faith.

Our Family Home Evening Video on Kindness

For Family Home Evening this week we talked about one of our family principles - Kindness. We used this video to introduce the theme. We found it especially instructive in helping the children learn about empathy and perspective taking.

Tim's Video of Chanel and Abbie's Parties.

Chanel and Abbie's Birthdays from Tim Coulson on Vimeo.

My little brother, Tim, drove to Wollongong with Kesh, his wife, to photograph Chanel's 11th birthday party in the Rose Garden at the Wollongong Botanical Gardens.

Since Abbie was having her 8th birthday party the same afternoon at our house, they hung around a little longer and snapped a couple of extra photos.

Hope you enjoy them.

If you'd like to see it in full screen click on 'vimeo' in the bottom right of the video screen. It will link to the vimeo page. When you see the video there, click on the little symbol in the bottom right corner and you should get the full screen.

Celebrations

For the first time in ages we’ve had a fairly uneventful week. Still busy, and still containing memorable highlights, but just a little less eventful than we’re used to.

Front Page News

A very full week for our family this week...

Tuesday the local paper ran a story based on an interview they’d done with me the previous week. I had talked about research that shows that children can have a negative impact on parent’s happiness. I would have preferred that they wrote a different headline, but I was grateful for the response it brought me. I even got a call from ABC radio and had a 15 minute interview on air that morning. Over 200 people completed my questionnaire as a result of the article.