Coffee with my friends

This week I am on leave and although no trips are planned, we are still cleaning, scrubbed and making this wonderful shell full of light and air on the very edge of the National Park and open bushland, into our home.

But before I continue with the work component and spend time with Geni and Leonnie, I shall enjoy my morning coffee with my friends, here.  And catch up.  

" A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world."  Lois Wyse.

This friendship is a comfortable place I place myself and just AM.  I trust those who visit me there.  Their loyalty to me and their advice and honesty has helped me weather so many of the storms life has laid on me and over my busy life.  Each and every one of you I treasure.

I wish to leave you with a quote:

"Pick a day.  Enjoy it to the hilt.  The day as it comes.  People as they come... the past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present - and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future."  AUDREY HEPBURN

Saturday we were enjoying our last lazy unencumbered morning and moving bits and pieces of furniture around and planning a change or two of placement when the phone rang.  It was Leonnie. In tears.  Geni took over and asked if we could go down and collect them.  It was around lunchtime so Tony and I grabbed our shoes and began to head  out to the car while reassuring them.  Kate, their dad's girlfriend, had made Leonnie cry.  Their dad was at the bowling club ( cheap booze, gambling on the horses -after all, it is the autumn carnival at the races and being Saturday even though it was his daughters last day with them, HE was absent and he left them with his girlfriend. )  I can understand her upset and resentment.

Geni went and suggested to kate that she understands that Dad and she may be fighting but Leonnie and she had just got up so they didn;t understand why she was "mad "(angry) at them?  I have no doubt whatsoever that Kate may have been confronted by her plain speaking.  Kate has an 8 year old daughter ( Faith) who takes every opportunity to hit and kick the older girls.  When the older girls ask her to stop or ask the adults to intervene, Kate denies her daughter can do any wrong and suggests my girls are making it up.  My girls do see Faith as a spoiled brat but feel they should be treated the same.  Kate apparently goes home to her mother every time Graeme and she fight.  So she and Faith left and left my girls in that house alone.

I asked them to get their things together.  Then we made our way down there.  Their dad told them from the bowling club - not straight back home - to tell us NOT to come. Too late. Plus if he has been at the Club he will have been drinking and even if he borrowed a car to bring them, he would be inebriated.  So, no.  Not good enough.

He didn't come straight home but he was there when we collected the girls.  he came back to emotionally LOAD Leonnie because he is afraid she will want to move into here with us now.  Leonnie and I talked and I told her that there is no way I would load her.  That I have full confidence that she will make her own decision but the thing I did say was that she needs to make her decision based on what is best for HER - not on making me happy or daddy happy.  That we are adults and therefore responsible for our own happiness, as she is for hers.

Both girls have emptied the fridge and the pantry so I suspect there wasn't much at their dad's place.  But that is expected.

The first thing we all did was sort through and setup each girls bedroom.  Tony and I hadn't done that as being teens we expected they would have their own idea about what they would like, so now the living area is completely arranged and there are only a few leftover bags and storage to go through.

We also spent most of Sunday sorting through and rearranging the downstairs section in preparation for Leonnie's slumber party this Friday evening.  What fun!!!