The good, the bad and the plain horrible....

The good: The lovely Bec over at Honi Designs is generously giving away a pile of her cool and useful stuff to anyone (who lives in Sydney) that leaves a comment on her blog, and I was lucky enough to score this gorgeous pink dress form:

I never win anything, so to land this is a pleasant surprise. Hopefully it will be closer to my size than my current dress form, but if not I have so many projects on the go that a second dressform will certainly not go unused. Bec also has several other giveways happening at the moment, so if you live in Sydney pop on over to her blog to say hello!

The bad: bubs, hubs and I are having a family portrait taken this weekend, and in all the bags of lovely hand-me-down clothes that I've received would you believe there is not one dress for Anna to get all prettied up in! But that is easily rectified, and actually I'll admit I am glad I finally have a reason to sew something for her. So I made her this little dress from a red cotton cherry print and cotton lace that I had in the stash, from now OOPMcCalls 3994:

Isn't it cute? The bad thing however is that it is too big! I've been foiled again by bad sizing from the pattern companies. My fault though, I cut this out whilst Anna was napping and not wanting to wake her to measure her, I decided just to cut it out based on the pattern size for a 6 month old. Since she is now 7 months I thought it would fit, but luck was not on my size. However all is not lost, it will fit her for summer and the weather around here has turned cool again so I'm in the process of making her a little tunic that involves corduroy! and ric rac! Now I just need to finish it in time for Saturday.

The plain horrible: Anna is currently suffering from her first bout of croup, and since she is still smiling and generally happy in between coughing I guess it's not as bad as the sounds emanating from her chest. Being first time parents, we had no idea what was wrong with her when last night around 10.30pm she started coughing like a sea otter, but thankfully in Sydney there is an after hours doctors service that gave us advice over the phone, and then within an hour and a half a doctor came to our home to check her out. Plus this service is fully bulk billed so it didn't cost us a thing (except in all the taxes we pay of course). Unfortunately there are no chemists open at 1.30am, even those in the seediest parts of Kings Cross where everything else is 24hrs, so we ended up at Concord hospital emergency department at 3.30am where they gave her a steroid dose which eased her symptoms and helped with her breathing so when we all got home we managed to get a little sleep (only 2 hours for my husband though before he went to work!). Thankfully the hospital is only 5 minutes from my house, I'll never curse the sound of those ambulance sirens again.

There's been so much press lately about how terrible the NSW health system is, but our experience has been nothing but great. Sure Concord hospital is looking pretty old and run down, but the staff there have been so lovely and efficient every time I've been there I can't complain at all. And getting a doctor to come to your house, let alone at 1.30am? And not paying a cent for it? Now that is service.

Anyway Anna is sleeping like a champion today, and even though she is doing her best Darth Vader impression she seems to be in good spirits so hopefully this will past in a few days and we'll be back to normal, well as normal as things can get around these parts anyway!

Have a good weekend everyone, happy sewing